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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elroy who wrote (220759)	2/24/2007 12:55:18 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

"Uhmmmm, do you know AT&T's balance sheet history, or are you also making this up?" Do YOU? Or are YOU making stuff up? How old ARE you anyway? AT&T is quite a bit older than you, or me. Do you even know that AT&T used to have a government sanctioned monopoly on ALL telephones in the US? They were ALL AT&T phones. I have read a history of AT&T. Have you? It's a fascinating story of one of America's first "tech" companies. amazon.com "From Publishers Weekly There is much more fall than rise in this riveting account of AT&T's disastrous recent history from USA Today telecom reporter Cauley. While offering only a brief look at AT&T's long, iconic history, Cauley digs in with gusto near the end of Robert Allen's reign as CEO and chairman in the mid-1990s, when the company lost precious years as its long-distance cash cow began wasting away. Cauley is hitting on all cylinders by the time she reaches the heart of the book, the period after Allen was belatedly deposed and Michael Armstrong came to power. Armstrong latched onto cable as AT&T's lifeline to the future, a laudable vision that, the journalist makes mercilessly clear, was butchered in execution. As Armstrong's team overpaid for second-rate companies and bobbled the complex integration issues, the stock market implodes, taking with it the company's capacity to manage its debt load; the competitive pressures, along with WorldCom's massive fraud, destroyed the margins in long distance. Add it all up and you have what Cauley characterizes as a "perfect storm." Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. "