AT&T's Costly Game of Catch-Up

摘要

As a reporter who follows the telecommunications industry, I'm always amazed at the way shrewd diagnoses of AT&T's problems seem to pop up anywhere. Like in taxicabs. Just recently, while careening through Manhattan on my way to the press conference announcing AT&T's acquisition of TCI, my cabbie told me, "I hear AT&T's getting into the cable business. I'll try them." And why is that? "They sent me a check for $100 to stay with them for long distance." Yet another pointed reminder of AT&T's tradition of bloated costs and misguided management: Those checks were a mainstay—an expensive, wasteful mainstay—of AT&T's marketing.