Verizon isn’t a tech company. It’s a vendor-management company.
Strip away the marketing and the glossy 5G ads and what do you actually own?
• Spectrum licenses
• Some real estate (towers, buildings, fiber easements)
Everything else—core network gear, handsets, billing platforms, even the “innovative” services—is rented, outsourced, or white-labeled from someone else. Verizon doesn’t build; it integrates, negotiates, and marks up.
For a decade-plus that was more than enough. Mobile-device penetration went from ~60 % to nearly 90 % and then kept climbing. All the company had to do was count the cash. Hundreds of billions—bordering on trillions in cumulative revenue—rolled in with almost no heavy lifting. The network largely ran itself, churn was low, and Wall Street rewarded the steady dividend growth.
Then the hands came off the wheel.
Greed set in. Prices crept up, customer service eroded, and the attitude became “we’re Verizon—we’re great, right?”
Meanwhile, hyperscalers quietly swallowed the home: they own the routers, the streaming boxes, the smart TVs, the voice assistants. Cable operators and upstarts kept building fiber and fixed-wireless networks. Suddenly every carrier looks the same to the average customer. The only variable left is price.
And that’s exactly where we are today: a commoditized, stagnated industry where differentiation has vanished and the only remaining game is who can squeeze the last margin out of the pipe.
The easy-money era is over. The gig is up.
And now the board and execs woke from their stupor and are taking it out on loyal employees with the temporary, non-sustainable, oldest trick in the book: mass layoffs to “cook” the books for a short-term stock pop.
What is new, Dan?
What’s the plan and the big idea? Keep firing people?
AI may be part of it, but what else are you going to bring to build real, sustainable growth?