AT&T: Kleine Geschichte eines
großen Niedergangs

[08-02-05 / hw] John Dix schreibt auf Network World Fusion am 7. Februar über die wechselvolle Geschichte des einstigen Monopolisten AT&T, der ehemals größten Telefongesellschaft der USA: „The business case studies that chronicle the history of AT&T won't be kind. At its peak, AT&T had more than 1 million employees, $150 billion in assets (more than the top three U.S. industrial companies combined), and some $70 billion in revenue. That success, however, was essentially achieved in a regulated monopoly environment.

But even when that monopoly bubble was popped in 1984 and AT&T agreed to spin off its 22 operating companies, the prevailing wisdom was AT&T was in the catbird seat. It had close to $40 billion in revenue and the lucrative long-distance business largely to itself.

What's more, AT&T had a treasure chest of network technologies in Bell Labs, everything from fast packet switching/ATM to voice/data integration technologies and LAN gear. The data networking world was unfolding, and the future was ripe with opportunity.

But the next 20 years would see the company squander those chances and make huge, fruitless bets. To begin with, it never successfully commercialized its enterprise data network technologies, while upstarts like Cisco and 3Com took off.

So, unable to build success, the company tried to buy it. Believing that the future was integrating computing with communications, AT&T spent big to buy minicomputer maker NCR in 1991. Five years later, it changed its mind and dumped the assets.

It made another big bet in 1993 when it merged with McCaw Cellular Communications, then the largest cell carrier. The cell goods would be spun off into AT&T Wireless in 2001 and later sold to Cingular Wireless.

The last hurrah was in 1999 when AT&T started scooping up CATV companies to build an end-to-end, facilities-based network. It spent some $100 billion to become the largest cable company virtually over-night, only to sell it all off in 2002 - another colossal failure.

In the meantime, real competition grew in AT&T's core wide-area enterprise business, eroding its share, and the consumer business took a nose dive. Twenty-one years after divestiture, AT&T is $9 billion smaller and still shrinking: 2004 revenue is down 12% from 2003, and the company reported a whopping $6.1 billion loss as it took various impairment and restructuring charges.

The good news in all of this is that AT&T today is pared back to its essentials - a focused, high-end enterprise network service provider. The question is if there is any leverage to be gained merging that with SBC. Our guess: not much.“