#history

45min. urban exploration video from ~5 months ago of the closed and abandoned IBM Palisades site. Sad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjQ2PAgUcM8

For some reason, and don't ask...lol...I did a random Nielsen search on reddit, and sure enough the first thing that came up was an 18yr old thread from back in the day during the original Nielsen demolition by Calhoun/Habib regarding their "genius" idea that deleting the "reply all" button in our Microsoft Outlook emails would save money! Lol. Man, I remember this like it was yesterday. This would have been circa 2008, about 2 years into the "transformation." And here we are all these years later!

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7ttuo/nielsen_deletes_replytoall_button/

Historically, highest it has ever been. It really shot up in 1998/99 and then tanked. What happened during this time? Besides the Honolulu stabbings that happened well after stock was falling.

I was giving a lecture to UMKC students. I brought up DST as a locally grown company. Not a single student in the BUSINESS class knew of DST. They had no idea. Even after I explained it. Dst is just past history

I still remember when getting hired at T meant you were set for life. You'd retire from here. Now look at us. Those were the days, huh?

1. COULD HAVE OPEREATED IN TEXAS BUT JOBS GIVEN TO CWA EAST COAST PUKE WAY BACK IN 2000.

VERIZON LOST 4.5 TO 5 BILLION ON OATH.

CEO WALKS FREE. LOCK SOME OF THESE FU----S UP.

I see posts on here all the time lamenting PE ownership, made without any understanding of how we got to this point, and how this goes all the way back to asinine decisions pre-bankruptcy in 2013. I’ve decided to play Cengage historian and lay some of this out for posterity, and so I can yell at the sky

2012–2013: Debt pile gets ugly
• Pre-bankruptcy: Before Chapter 11, Cengage was already doing financial engineering just to push out maturities — e.g., in 2012 it sold $725M of 11.5% senior secured notes due 2020 and amended its credit facilities to extend term loan and revolver maturities.
• July 2, 2013: Cengage files for Chapter 11 with about $5.8B of outstanding debt, announcing a “pre-arranged” restructuring to eliminate more than $4B of that.
Even before bankruptcy, they were in the classic LBO textbook-publisher trap: lots of high-coupon debt, some of it maturing in big lumps, and a business that’s not exactly a rocket ship.

2014: Emerges from Chapter 11… still leveraged
• April 1, 2014: Cengage officially emerges from Chapter 11. The plan cuts ~$4B of funded debt and brings in $1.75B of new Term Loan B financing, plus a $250M asset-based revolver, as exit financing.
• Post-reorg, they’re no longer at $5.8B of debt, but they do still have roughly ~$1.8–2B of funded debt sitting above a business doing around ~$2B of revenue at the time, still pretty leveraged.

That Term Loan B is key. By design, those loans usually have tiny quarterly amortization and then a big “bullet” (lump-sum) repayment at maturity. You drag a big principal balance for years, paying interest the whole time, then face a huge refinancing/repayment cliff at the end.

2014–2019: Term loan era, dividend recaps, and financial engineering
• In the years after emergence, Cengage spends a lot of time tweaking the capital structure: repricing the term loan, issuing additional term debt, and even doing share-repurchase and dividend recap transactions (they literally disclosed a “dividend recapitalization” in FY2015 current reports).
• if you’re still doing buybacks / dividends and refinancing loans rather than aggressively paying them down, you’re implicitly betting that refinancing the big bullet at the end of the term will be doable when you get there.
So by late 2010s you’ve got a company that did cut its original $5.8B anchor, but is still sitting on a large secured term loan and reliant on capital markets to roll that over when maturities and balloon payments come due.

2019–2020: Aborted McGraw-Hill merger, more uncertainty
• In 2019 Cengage announces a planned merger with McGraw-Hill and a related amendment to its senior secured credit facilities, again, capital structure is clearly front-and-center.
• The merger is ultimately called off in 2020 after regulatory issues, which leaves Cengage still independent, still carrying its own debt stack, and now without the scale/merger synergies that were supposed to help.
So by early 2020s, you’ve got: meaningful secured debt, a term-loan structure with big future maturities, and no merger “escape hatch.”

2021–2022: Rising rates + debt drag
• For FY22 (year ended March 31, 2022), Cengage reports adjusted cash revenue of about $1.37B and Adjusted Cash EBITDA less prepub of ~$326M.
• That’s a decent EBITDA number, but on top of a large term loan it still implies a non-trivial leverage ratio. As global rates move up and credit spreads widen (2022–2023), the cost of keeping that debt financed goes up, and the risk of refinancing a big bullet at attractive rates gets worse.
The company itself starts talking more about “financial flexibility” and de-leveraging in investor materials around this time… they know the balance sheet is constraining what they can do.

April 2023: Apollo preferred equity to prevent collapse
• April 17, 2023: Cengage announces that Apollo Funds will invest $500M into a new series of convertible preferred stock
• In the press release, Cengage explicitly says it will use the proceeds to “reduce outstanding debt and lower interest expense,” and to “increase financial flexibility” to invest in growth.
The old LBO-style debt and its balloon risk were getting harder and more expensive to carry in a higher-rate world. Rather than wait for a ugly refinancing fight when the big maturities hit, they sold a chunk of the company to Apollo via preferred equity, then used that cash to pay down loans and push the maturity wall further out.

2023–2025: PE priorities, “efficiency,” and repeated layoffs
Once Apollo is in, the priorities shift to the usual PE playbook:
• Sharpen the focus on EBITDA, cash flow and “portfolio mix
• Cuts, cuts, cuts

A classic pattern of a ZombieCo:

1. Heavy term-loan/balloon-style post-bankruptcy debt +
2. Rising interest rates and a tougher refi environment
3. Need to de-risk the maturity wall with Apollo preferred equity
4. Apollo-style mandate to improve profitability and reallocate capital
5. Repeated restructuring and headcount reductions

For those of you too young to remember, he's the basic history of Corporate layoffs in America that all started with the government mandated breakup of the AT&T Bell System telephone monopoly on January 1, 1984 ("Divestiture" of AT&T's local Telephone Operating Companies, including Bell Atlantic).

AT&T Information Systems (IS) layoffs started in January 1984 that impacted ~25,000 employees with literally dozens of major rounds of cutbacks at AT&T following well into the 2000's. When it first began to happen it was literally a feeling of disbelief by not only by AT&T employees and their families, who were used to the benevolent Bell System ("Ma Bell") work culture, but also by Americans at large who couldn't fully grasp that the "contract" of employment for life was over at major companies. IBM soon followed suite and once they did the floodgates opened up on mass corporate layoffs which soon became commonplace and continue to this day.

In the 1970s, deep inside a research center in Palo Alto, a group of young Xerox engineers quietly built the future. They created a machine unlike anything the world had seen. A screen you could point at. A small device that let you move a cursor with your hand. Windows that opened and closed. Icons that behaved like real objects. Even the ethernet cables that would later connect the modern internet. It was called the Alto, and it was decades ahead of its time.
But inside Xerox headquarters, the company still viewed itself as a copier business. The innovations coming out of the research lab felt strange and experimental, far removed from office equipment and paper. Management could not see the commercial value of a graphical interface or a computer mouse. The Alto never reached the mass market, even though it held the blueprint of the personal computer revolution.
In December 1979, Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC through a technology exchange agreement. Engineers showed him the graphical interface and the mouse. Jobs later said it was like seeing the future unfold in real time. He returned to Apple energized and committed to transforming these concepts into a consumer machine. The result was the Macintosh, launched in 1984, the first widely accessible computer with a graphical interface.
People often say Apple stole from Xerox. The truth is more complicated. Xerox had built extraordinary tools but did not move to commercialize them. Apple recognized their potential and reshaped them into products that could reach millions. The modern computer industry grew from that moment when one company overlooked its own inventions and another saw the opportunity clearly.
The story of Xerox PARC remains a reminder that innovation alone is not enough. Vision requires the ability to recognize value, invest wisely, and understand how transformative ideas can reshape the world.
Story based on historical records.

Do Wells Fargo have a history of paying or new employees, or do they wait for at least the first performance review?(Mid year for me)

It's good to know there are 'laws' in place to prevent telecoms from doing this again. We know they have the best interest of the customer (shareholders) as their top 'priority'!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/analyzing-accounting-fraud-worldcom-lessons-learned-future-almutairi

A heart warming article on WSJ about the longest serving employee of QC..

De... ..nch at Qualcomm
Principal engineer/manager
Age: 61
Date hired: 1987

Early days: Qualcomm’s longest-serving employee moved to San Diego after college, looking for warm weather. He saw a classified ad in the San Diego Union-Tribune in 1987 and applied for a role as a technician. He was 22. “I had no idea what the company was,” he said. Qualcomm would go on to power the technology used inside millions of cellphones and other devices, with Punch working on many of the company’s key projects.

Taking requests now. Thank you so much.

The Apple IIe (styled as Apple //e) is the third model in the Apple II series of personal computers produced by Apple Computer. It was released in January 1983 as the successor to the Apple II Plus. The e in the name stands for enhanced. It is the first Apple II with built-in lowercase, 80-column text support and 64K RAM standard, while reducing the total chip count from previous models by approximately 75%.

Improved expandability combined with the new features made for an attractive general-purpose machine to first-time computer shoppers. As the last surviving model of the Apple II computer line before discontinuation, and having been manufactured and sold for nearly 11 years with relatively few changes, the IIe was the longest-lived computer in Apple's history.

Never had a IIe. But I worked on a Lisa.

The first hard drive was the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit, introduced in 1956 as part of the IBM 305 RAMAC computer system. It could store 3.75 to 5 megabytes of data on 50 24-inch platters, weighed over a ton, and was roughly the size of two large refrigerators.

This introduced the concept of random access storage, which was a major improvement over previous methods like magnetic tape and punched cards.

Will never forget that magical time.

https://www.livescience.com/technology/communications/science-history-first-computer-to-computer-message-lays-the-foundation-for-the-internet-but-it-crashes-halfway-through-oct-29-1969

This is a time I wish I could have been a part of. It started out as 4 nodes. Had I been a bit older I would have been a part of the beginning. It was 6 years later that I did become a part of implementing the ARPANET which would become the internet. It's likely most on this board weren't even born yet.

Fortran is a computer language that is for the most part ridiculed (unjustly) now, however it was used to get us to the moon and back, and was used to implement the first packet switching.

"From there, the military agency funded a project to create such a network. For the system to work, it needed a way to break up messages from a sender into smaller portions that were then reassembled at the destination. Boehm and Baran simulated this process, which would eventually become known as packet switching, using a program written in the computer language Fortran."

Those were exciting times never to be had again.

So 14000 is only 4% of corporate. 27000 was in fact the largest in history.
And there are so many redundant layers of management still.

https://thenewstack.io/ken-thompson-recalls-unixs-rowdy-lock-picking-origins/

I had the honor of interviewing at Bell Labs in 1980. This type of environment will never happen again.

I was there starting in the early 80s. I always said if we had gone out on strike for a week or month etc IBM and Gerstner would not have done this pension heist. But they did again and again and as the writer states "...not a peep from IBM employees at the time...". I recall people were confused and disappointed more than outrageously angry as we should have been. I think it was "fog of war confusion" by IBM employees who thought it was not happening or IBM would change it's mind since the bond between employees and IBM had always been so string and trustful. For many of us our promised pensions done during recruitment and hiring/onboarding were cut by 50% or more. Enjoy this read and thanks to the author who likely reads these posts. It is too long to paste in here inline. Well worth the time to read it as it will better show you IBM's evilness that came in under Gerstner and infects IBM to this day.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181019074906/http://www.ibmemployee.com/RetirementHeist.shtml

https://journalrecord.com/1997/07/17/walter-leaves-att-after-fallout-with-allen/

Take a look at the FI price history for all years. If you know FI (FISV), you would know that FI has always been a slow and steady stock with 8 splits starting in 1991 and the last being in 2018.

Fiserv was the slow, ever increasing, dependable stock with splits that realized compounding value. It was a great stock to own inside or outside the company.

Look at the odd outlier behavior starting in 2019. It's almost like the stock was severely manipulated because it does not follow the historical trend. Remember, the stock price graph doesn't lie. Even if you don't believe it was manipulated, you can see the fingerprints of something other than a normal Fiserv at least in historical terms.

Some important quotes we can ponder to assess the caliber of our past leader:

"What the heck’s the commissioner of Social Security? What am I going to do?”

“You know, one of my great skills, I’m one of the great Googlers on the East Coast," he said. "Put that as the headline for the post: ‘great Googler-in-chief, chief-in-Googler,’ or whatever."

History doesn't repeat, but it does have echoes: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/03/10/target-layoffs

Good luck to all who wish to keep their jobs (and to those who hope to get laid off to get some paid time to search for something else).

...when AT&T was cutting cutting cutting and people said "That's what "AT&T" now stands for." We've come a long way, huh?

How has TI historically handled RIFs? I haven’t been at TI long enough to see other RIFs of this magnitude

https://xeroxnostalgia.com/

https://www.businessinsider.com/once-it-seemed-impossible-ibm-is-now-worth-more-than-microsoft-2011-5

Will the 2nd edition be released soon to commemmorate the last 80 years ?

Our Journey these past 6 years…

For those who started in 2019 and after, the firm was not this way. It ranked highly on Best Places to Work, JD Power for both client and associate satisfaction, etc. It was a place where qualifications, education, experience, and success mattered. Not your makeup at birth. It was a place where our MP didn’t get lost in creating grandiose corporate speak or buzzwords where she thinks eloquence means leadership - it doesn’t. You may not be responsible for this situation, you are not to blame but without you knowing it - you helped create it. It was a firm who took pride in the strong workforce it created.

A timeline of a cultural crisis:

2019:
January 1 - Penny becomes the 6 managing partner.
T1 - Ambitious goal setting starts on corporate and field representation on various societal, political, and cultural ideology important to her agenda. The word smithing goes into hyperdrive. The field become disenchanted with her verbiage on “our clients”. This becomes a lightening rod of contention with those who create the revenue versus those who decide to split it.
T2 - Same as above
T3 - Same as above
Penny earned $11.5 million in 2018. Her first year in 2019 as MD she received a modest increase in pay to $11.67 million.

2020: COVID

March 14th - home office associates are sent home.
March 20th - STL Business Journal publishes an article on Penny’s pick as Chief of Human Resources, Kristin Johnson. Titled “Life in Balance: Kristin Johnson runs hard at work and play”. This article lauds her zero experience in HR and how Kristin feels being an entry level c-suite executive to a new role adds confidence with those she leads and builds trust around the policy of the firm. This is a watershed mark in Penny placing mandates on hiring quotas for people unqualified for roles. Across the firm hiring requisitions are left open longer than 365 days to hit certain quotas.
March/April - Penny takes a page from 2009 and freezes wages. Only to repeal her decision a few weeks later as her public pay increase is published. Her pay raise is 25.7% to $14.7 million.
April - we have 473 general partners.
T3 - Penny, sensing continued dissatisfaction with field leadership and in line with her belief that a merit based decision process is cumbersome, invites all RLs into the GP population ballooning the number to over 700.
October an associate sends the following to Penny’s Page:
“Never have I felt so disconnected from the firm and where it seems to be headed. It's not COVID and working remotely. That part doesn't help to be sure, but it's more a divergence in mindset and philosophy. I've grown up feeling extremely aligned with the firm. The business was relatively simple, leadership was transparent, trustworthy and directional. It's not any one thing that's changed. It's all of it. And I think it's as you have described it - slowly and then suddenly. I would guess that as someone reads this, they will probably take it as affirmation that the firm is making the needed changes and that losing someone like me along the way is a necessary by-product. Might be true. But it's also precisely what I mean by what is changing at the firm. The firm I knew would have cared and truly wanted to bring everyone along. I feel like now, this might merely be an afterthought and the unfortunate but necessary exhaust fumes of a firm accelerating away from who it was.”

2021:
March - field attrition is spiking. Divisive rhetoric and policies are challenging the FA ethos “We’ll leave you alone as long as you run a sound, profitable, and ethical office”
March - industry news shares her pay is now $22.6 million and that Penny will start the $1.5 billion tech spend and buy a RIA.
Mid Year - her plans to buy an industrial bank starts to unravel.
Mid Year - yearly home office local events like Six Flags and Grants Farm are cancelled since HBAs are unable to attend.
T3- in addition to increased field attrition, home office veteran departures start to increase. Trimester bonuses start to decrease across the home office. A trend that is present today.

2022:
Billions in assets are hemorrhaging. FAs dissatisfied at the slowness of adoption is preventing them from evolving leave for other firms.
The uptick in GP departures increases. The political and DEI measures creates the liability and discrimination lawsuits that snowballs into 2025.
July 2 - Jennifer Marcontell leaves for Ameriprise
Penny makes certain FAs a partner to prevent their exodus.
Since 2022 to present the outflow of level 10s has never been this high.
Former partners go into competition with Edward Jones in creating their own firm.
2022 is the year that Penny decides internal talent are not suitable to her agenda. She hires David Chubak and others from outside of the industry and a few BDs.
The amount of capital balloons which, in turn, su-ks profit and preventing further investment back into the business.

2023:
The home office hiring spree with bloated salaries and sign on bonuses creates an overspend of the hiring budget by $20 million.

November 29 - An email is sent to all home office associates titled, “The Home Office Colleague Experience”. A 9 minute video where Penny wanted to give “timely updates around our work to improve the home office’s colleague experience”. A Mea Culpa was issued regarding the past few years and that Jennifer Kingston will prioritize both Total Rewards and morale while combating the dark cloud that became the climate. An extra vacation day was provided to all associates as the first step. Penny states that since July 2020, the firm had hired 2,700 new associates due to the past few years of attrition and new leaders trying to restructure their teams and departments because they did not understand the model they inherited. The loss of years of a culture and the brain trust of experience has created a vacuum especially with new leaders and associates trying to understand the Edward Jones ecosystem.

2024:
T1 - Penny says her husband is “afraid we’re going to run out of money during retirement”. Her 2024 total earnings get a 15.7% bump to $29 million.
T2 - The SFA feedback on the ELT is the lowest ever recorded. Weather then address it, and realizing the need to build out the UHNW area and over capitalized with GP capital. The plan for Enterprise Reimagined is hatched.
T3 - Offsourcing increases rapidly to India. Roughly 400 associates in service and operations are let go with the first set of severance packages. This marks the first time for EJ to offer severances other than to GPs.

2025:
T1 - Enterprise Reimagined is formally announced.
Attrition in the field increased to 6.4 from 5.3 one year prior.
New households drop 55% when compared to a year prior.
New assets slipped by 10% year over year.
Retirement plans and aging clients to blame. The collapse of various training departments among other areas of the firm has led to a decrease in coaching on business outcomes. Asset flows to competitors increases not due to aging but increase in fees, subpar FA service, lack of cross generational planning, and FA losses.
T2 - Enterprise Reimagine is formally launched. The next timeline begins for 2026 in sourcing and shoring and 2027 will wrap up ER with AI and automation. In 2028 the next MP will not be a MP but a CEO.

Penny’s Yearly Earnings Recap:
2019 = $11.7 million.
2020 = $14.7 million.
2021 = $22.6 million.
2022 = $21.4 million.
2023 = $25 million.
2024 = $29 million.
Total = $124,400,000.

The region jobs do not exist any more. It was a wonderful time to work for Allstate. A team environment. You went to work every morning knowing you were working toward something. If you had the right leadership. We did. We drove growth for the company. Those who were part of that time appreciate the experience. So, there was a time that working for Allstate was something to be proud of and fun. It did happen. New times now. It still can be rewarding. Carry on.