Take away #1 from the Time article:
"My landline is $10 or $12 a month. Are you losing money on the landline business? "
Stankey: Ten dollars does not cover the cost of the landline.
Reasonable Person: I don't know anyone who only pays 10 or 12 dollars a month for a POTS line. I'd like to meet them. I pay a lot more than that.
Take away #2
Why has buying entertainment companies proved to be such a minefield for outside companies?
Reasonable person: It is not minefield for companies that know the business. They do what they know how to do, and do it well. Stankey, not so much.
Take away #3
Right after the deal was announced you paid a visit to HBO headquarters in New York. The meeting was leaked to the press and you were presented in an unflattering light as a sort of clueless telcom guy that didn’t really get the creative business. Is the entertainment industry more of a snake pit than the telco industry?
Stankey, you got your a-s handed to you. At this point you lost all and any faith in your "leadership". You can talk about how different corporate cultures are motivated, but those would be best served by your silence and more importantly your absence.
Take away #4
A lot of what you laid out that day for HBO and got so much blowback about, like increasing volume and production, has paid off. HBO added something like 3 million customers in the last quarter.
HBO is doing better once rid of AT&T.
Take away # 5
On a macro basis what is your reading of the health of consumers right now? Is it still your view that people are a bit flush?
Stankey: There’s still an awful lot of money sitting in people’s bank accounts from what I would consider to be some of the government-subsidized distributions that took place and changed people’s cash position.
Stankey, do you really think that the few thousand dollars the the government sent out a year ago is still going to be their bank accounts and those folks just itching to send it to AT&T? Most people are trying to keep gas in their car and keep their mortgage from defaulting .
The sycophants that post accolades toward you on the AT&T insider are a very small minority. They follow you around downtown Dallas like baby geese looking for their Mama. You do not have the confidence of the workforce and I don't know if you ever gain that credibility.