He and Randy will be studied for years to come in business schools on how to ruin a once great business.
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Just looked up Stephenson net worth. 150 million
Take away about 145 million is a good start
Now he is on the board at Walmart
Ed had his issues, but Stan at Cingular was incredible. Ralph tried to carry on the legacy, but nobody could replicate the late Sigman.
No, Whitacre bought obsolete Telcos with their aged technologies, green copper, and customers fleeing for cell service with other companies all the while complaining that the world is stealing his pipes.
Under Eddie, we got behind, didn't get COLA raises, bought shrinking businesses and listened to him complain all the while cashing his obscene check amounts.
Since 1984 this company has never shown leadership. Ed abused the employees taking credit when times were good and blaming everyone else when times were bad.
Employees always took the hit.
Do I have this right: We bought a satellite tv provider, ran it into the ground & had to sell off a chunk. Then we buy a big media company and have to spin it off with a cable channel after telling everyone there we knew how to run their business better. And we did all this while while ignoring the core business and falling behind every competitor in the telcom sector.
At least we now know why the Stank was such a grump bug at the town hall last week.
It is amazing that we are going back to strategy of what Elliott said they should do. All of us knew this. All that nonsense about ecosystems, advertising, distribution, software defined networks (yeah that one is so laughable if not crazy), and where do we end up?
After losing over 100 billion, go back to purchasing wireless spectrum and upgrading wireless networks, and digging ground to lay fiber. What we should have done all along.
Stankey and Randall should be in jail.
It will be remembered by the C-Suite as how AT&T purchased all these profitable companies and they failed, but it was never their fault. It’s just a coincidence that each of these companies succeeded before the acquisition and after they were split off, but were run into the ground while being controlled by AT&T. For good measure, they’ll blame the failures on the union.
Ed Whitacre and Stan Sigman set SBC/Cingular up for dominance. Poor Stan is rolling in his grave with what Randall and Stanley Leg have done. SBC should stopped while it was ahead after BellSouth. Think how different things would’ve been if DirecTV didn’t happen, if the failed T-Mobile attempt wasn’t pursued in the first place, and if WarnerMedia hadn’t been acquired. Just think.
Whitacre put them in the position to take over!! The only study that will be done is compensation abuse.