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Nythoren t1_ix1q8dc wrote

Reply to comment by HorribleHairyHamster in How Did AT&T's $100 Billion Time Warner Deal Go So Wrong? by ix0WXOeip4V6

My experience with AT&T is that the culture was one of kingdom building. Departments were pitted against each other and the management of each of those departments treated them as their own selfishly guarded fiefs. No cross collaboration, all decisions made in a vacuum, and the focus seemed to be more of "is this good for my department" instead of "is this good for the company".

As an example, there was a contract for a routing system that was about to expire that was roughly $7 mil/year. With the reduced labor costs and efficiency that the system provided, it was saving the company as a whole over $100mil/year. Seems like a slam-dunk renewal. But the department head wanted to cut his costs, so he decided not to renew and instead shut the whole thing down, going back to manual routing. His reasoning? "I don't care about that $100 mil. That's corporate money. I need to cut costs in this department and that $7 mil is an easy choice".

Anecdotal example, but from my experience it was like that pretty well across the board. There doesn't seem to be any true central leadership. It's more like a confederation of city states that is loosely united under the CEO but not really taking any direction from that high up. Maybe they're too big?

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AidanAmerica t1_ix1tr8t wrote

That explains why they had multiple live TV services that competed with each other for a while there. It’s got to be something more complicated than just being too big. When AT&T (the old AT&T that went defunct in 2006) was at its biggest and most monopolistic, it also ran one of the country’s most innovative R&D laboratories, but they kept that technology tightly in their grip except when government regulators forced them to loosen it.

The smartest regulations that the government imposed on them are the ones that forced AT&T to stay primarily as a telephone operator and not get into new industries, because that allowed competitors to come into existence and not be squashed out of existence immediately. For example, a court order that disallowed AT&T from entering the computer business made it so that AT&T could only profit off of UNIX by licensing the source code out to others as a trade secret, allowing computer scientists to learn from and build off of the development that AT&T funded. Then those people built their own UNIX-compatible operating systems, and that’s how we got FreeBSD and Linux, which are used as the basis for every mainstream operating system today (except windows). So because of smart regulation in the 70s, businesses today can reuse that free code, rather than starting from scratch, making modern businesses more efficient. That turned out to be more meaningful than even the breakup of the Bell System

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