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Technology Stocks : IDT *(idtc) following this new issue?* -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawaii60 who wrote (22970)	1/4/2001 11:24:35 PM
From: Smear_campaign	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 30916

Hman, interesting. IYO, what gets announced first and in what time frame?

To: Hawaii60 who wrote (22970)	1/5/2001 8:55:20 AM
From: 613	Respond to of 30916

re: T. It is a little hard to believe that with T's current trouble they would not be jumping at the chance to tout its money saving efforts. You write "Also, nobody, even though ATT/Sprint/WCOM are ALL routing calls over the Internet right now, wants to admit the extent of what they are doing because they are avoiding tariffs and reducing margins by doing so." VOIP should be increasing margins - not decreasing them. The scarier side is that it is just not ready for prime time yet.

To: Hawaii60 who wrote (22970)	1/5/2001 2:27:50 PM
From: BinkY2K	Respond to of 30916

Politics in large organizations. I generally agree with much of what H60_60 has said about the internal squabbling at AT&T. If anything, I suspect it is worse than usual. I no longer work there or am privy to much of what is happening but what he writes rings true. Many of the upper managers are still bell-heads from the days when AT&T was a protected company. The new guys were often hired by the old guys. Change in the company is too slow. I worked in R&D and we always tried to go for the newest technologies but often met resistance. I tried pushing the company to do more with the Internet since 1982. Much of what we did was done on the sly and hidden in our budgets. No serious work grew out of that for at least 10 years. Too many folks had their fiefdom and did not see much reason to cooperate with others. As an example, when AT&T EasyLink Services asked the 800 folks to give them better rates like they gave to large customers, they refused. Why not charge us plenty so their bottom line was fatter. After all, where could we go? Could EasyLink buy from a competitor? Well, we got even with them by designing our own network that largely went around them. We installed POP's all over and connected them to our subnetwork and lowered costs dramatically. Soon, other organizations piggy-bagged off us (such as WorldNet) and some of the internal networks AT&T will be using for VoIP (As H60 mentions) are actually what grew out of ours. But, it is not always easy to get around this kind of stupidity. I remember when the company tried to break into the Computer business by selling the 3B5 machine, running UNIX. It was the size of a refrigerator, lying down. It was smaller than the 3B20, but was not selling that much. Someone else came up with the 3B2, then the size of a microwave, that outperformed it at much lower cost. Oops! Politics said that the 3B5 deserved a chance to make back the money paid for it. So, the 3B2 folks made a weird compromise. If they snipped a wire or two, the 3B2 slowed down and thus was not a competitor. So, they sold it that way, but not many. The 3B5 got a few more sales. Later, the 3B2 was suddenly improved simply by not cutting the wires anymore but the market had moved on and AT&T is not well known for selling computers, even internally. We gave it all to NCR and liberated it. Part of the problem is that to make any product takes lots of organizations. There is R&D where some folks are forward looking. There also are others like Product Management and the folks that maintain the product in the field as well as sales and others. An easy way to mess up a new product is to not fund it properly, or not provide proper marketing or not motivate the sales force to sell it rather than other things with higher margins. Another is to claim some other product competes with it. The recent announcements that the company is splitting into at least 4 units may be raising the politics to a higher level. Lots of wrangling over which units go to which company with what resources and people. I have been through this several times. Around 1982-3 the Labs was split and some folks went to Bellcore. I stayed with AT&T. Later, some went to NCR and some went to Lucent. Now, it seems much of the remaining AT&T Labs will stay with one company and be loaned out to the others in some way. Wonder how long that will last. I hope that if the pieces get small enough, and the older resisters retire or leave, some of the parts can really adapt and do well. Unfortunately for IDTC/NTOP, they picked this time to hitch their star to a company that has made some bold moves and now may be cautious about making more until they are ready. Jonas, I think, has found out that premature leaks have gotten him into trouble with factions at AT&T. So, this could be a longer wait than it could have been. My focus now is less on these stocks than on the entire market and economy. We are throwing away the Greenspan bounce in DAYS. Kinda scary?