The prophet & the Project Manager: How two guys from McCaw tackled AT&T's data dilemma

摘要

Does the most recent generation of wireless industry acolytes even know McCaw Cellular? From the youngest, baby-faced blue-collar technicians to the white-collar business school grads still paying off their student loans, McCaw is a name they vaguely associate with Seatde's other billionaire, that resident of the occasional corporate board. But do they know about McCaw Cellular? The company that invented roaming? The company that built and acquired properties that created the first national network? Do they know that McCaw was the epitome of an entrepreneurial and aggressive corporate culture a decade before anyone went to work for a dot-com? "It was a pretty strong, risk-taking culture," said Rod Nelson, executive vice president and chief technology officer at AT&T Wireless, who started working at McCaw in 1985. "We were the first ones doing automatic roaming. We may forget, but people didn't have it in 1989. We thought they should, and we knew we could get it done."