AT&T needs T-Mobile most for its WiFi

In the 36 hours or so since AT&T and Deutsche Telekom announced that the American carrier would be buying the U. S. subsidiary of the German phone company, there has been plenty of speculation (some of it right here) about what this will mean for customers and the wireless industry, but not very much, frankly, about why T-Mobile is worth $39 billion to AT&T. It’s about more subscribers, we’re told as though that is obvious, and back-office savings, plus extra spectrum with some special plans for 4G, but that’s not the biggest reason at all. The biggest reason why AT&T wants T-Mobile is because of WiFi.

Subscribers are nice, as are back-office and marketing savings, but […]

By |March 21st, 2011|2011|46 Comments
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Yahoo Should Buy Microsoft

microsoft_yahoo_1

My last column was all about the culture of Microsoft and how it makes real change difficult for the company.  It’s not just at Microsoft that these things happen, by the way: nearly all mature organizations get into similar ruts.  And if, like Microsoft, they are spectacularly profitable ruts, well then it isn’t surprising that things stay more or less permanently dysfunctional.

I said last time that a second column would follow with my specific suggestions for restructuring Microsoft, but now that I am really into it I think we might be looking at a total of three columns, not two.  But then I’ll be finished with Microsoft for a few months.

Setting out […]

By |February 8th, 2009|Uncategorized|60 Comments
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