Thread regarding Comcast layoffs

@cs agreed. The cuts need to come at the top, not the middle man/woman director or manager who is actually doing their job. Comcast cannot afford to lose anymore than what they already have. The chaos started the second restructuring happened last year and there were positions cut that were actually needed to link things together. A slew of VP roles were added instead.

@aa most people try and bypass AI bots to get a rep. People want to talk to someone they can trust and also understand. This works not only here but in sales, business, etc…It’s basic psychology. It has, and will continue to destroy customer service as you said.

THEIR PEOPLE.

Many employees are doing the work of several because of cuts —-this is beyond comparison to what similar organizations have for work loads—there are too many executive roles—sales expectations are causing constant turnover, which in turn leads to selling LESS products—customers simply cannot afford the pricing—sending positions to India and the training for these is causing everything to slow—time and money being lost in every direction. Comcast requires localized help for efficiency, as well as trust—-executives and chiefs continue to push for more—no one knows if any of these positions are tracked on performance or showing up—no, AI is not fast tracking anything—the list goes on.

Bottom line, when it was good, people were invested in, not taken advantage of.

I'll keep it simple.

1. Buying SKY
2. Too many executives
3. FDX instead of fiber rollout

@bq Hopefully the restructuring actually hits the VP layer this time because that's a huge part of our problem. We've got VPs reporting to VPs, some of them with nothing under them but contractors, and half of them won't make a decision without another VP blessing it. They don't add much. Mostly they slow down the people under them who are actually doing the work. If all we do is cut directors and managers and IC’s again, we end up with the same pile of VPs and fewer people to carry them.

You're all missing the point. For the last 30 years telecom was never about content or innovation. It's an incubator to keep high title executive company packages warm. You become a VP at comcast, sometimes get promoted if you lick the right boot, and you collect your fat check for very little work.

And if you blow it at comcast, charter, AT&T, direct, or Dish, simply move on to the next one as yet another executive. The industry is incestuous as he-l and at a certain point yur golden parachute has all upsides and virtually no downsides. Even when they fail, they fail up.

Great question. Here's what I believe Comcast should and shouldn't have done, in no particular order:

1. Treat your customers fairly and with dignity. As many have pointed out, customers will tolerate abuse; up until the moment they see a reasonable alternative, at which point they'll pivot (another corporate buzzword 🙂) without hesitation.
2. Bring in real talent. Leadership either lacked an eye for good talent or willfully chose not to bring in innovative, strategic, or inspiring leaders from the outside. They were content to surround themselves with yes-men and yes-women while happily counting strong returns.
3. They did a great job ki-ling competition in the cable access vendor space, forcing consolidation over the years. But what incentive do the few remaining vendors have to innovate when a giant customer is squeezing them for every last penny? Internally, teams aren't challenged by competition either, so they don't care whether the products work. Their EVPs/SVPs will protect them regardless of how bad the product is.
4. In the name of efficiency, cost savings, and "freedom to innovate," they ki-led off the remaining CMTS vendors. Besides Comcast, who is actually using vCMTS technology? As a matter of fact, Comcast is now stuck with one overseas vendor ; and not a very bright one at that. It took years to stabilize and scale that platform, and it still can't solve cable's Achilles heel: the asymmetric speed problem. Has anyone seen any real numbers in terms of cost saving or any ground braking innovation becoming industry standard?
   Comcast had a golden opportunity to move quickly to end-to-end fiber, but after a few years of trial deployments, they kicked those vendors to the curb and waited for their preferred overseas vendor to catch up. Meanwhile, they're still pushing the FDX/DOCSIS 4 spin.
5. "Content is king," we were told. Well, that didn't age well. There were so many opportunities to invest in or acquire any number of platforms, yet management despite all their industry connections, intelligence, and know-how was asleep at the wheel. No one at the higher levels ever faced consequences.
6. Take care of your frontline folks; the backbone of this company. They face angry customers every day while keeping the network running. Minimum wages and no career progression path will keep this function a revolving door.
7. Stop the BS surveys and Slido questions if management's intent is just to give people a forum to vent rather than actually solving the real issues or sincerely working toward solutions.
   I'm sure others may have better ideas than these.

Way less focus on mobile on every call and chat. Cut the ad budget hard. Offered a symmetrical upload/download speed for streamers as an add on option or a package. Worked to lobby for more and greater WFH tax benefits. Every remote work customer with a solid connection and the ability to spend is a hard lock.

But let's be real, people who are leaving for fixed wireless and such, it's due to cost. The economy is sc--wed, and you can't get blood from a stone. Right now it's about outlasting Elon and the current admin so he doesn't try and pull some hostile takeover nonsense.

Many of us not at the svp level have been asking and saying, bb will be over taken by fixed mobile and Starlink. We need to plan and adjust quickly. One product svp for years has said bb is and always be king. Well all my neighbors have Starlink, might ask them !

@ak there is very little innovation or thought leadership in business services these days.

I think there’s a bigger opportunity here than just trying to protect broadband. We already have a huge network, fiber, wireless, business customers and physical locations across the country. Why not use more of that for things like AI at the edge, cybersecurity, private wireless and other business services? We’ve already built the hard part. The question should be what else we can build on top of it and turn into new revenue.

Good question, glad someone's asking it instead of just piling on. Here's my take. Before the network stuff, I think we have to be honest about the customer piece. For years Xfinity ranked near the bottom on both ACSI and JD Power, well behind Verizon Fios and Google Fiber, and data cap overage fees were a constant, specific complaint. We only started climbing the rankings once fiber and 5G home internet gave people somewhere else to go. That's not "we ran a great company that got unlucky," that's we finally competed once we had to.

Now the bigger miss. We bought spectrum in 2017 for $1.7B, sat on it, then sold most of it to T-Mobile for double what we paid. In the C-band auction we put down a $100 million deposit and never even bid. A year later fixed wireless from T-Mobile and Verizon ate 90% of all new broadband adds in the country. Now we rent Verizon's network to compete with Verizon.

Same story with edge compute. We just announced an Nvidia AI edge deal this past March, using our own headends for AI inference. Good move…five years late. We had the same fiber and real estate in 2020 when nobody else wanted it.

So if you're asking what we should've done, treat customers like people worth keeping instead of a captive base, and use the network advantage while it was still ours instead of after everyone else caught up. NBCU and Sky are spinning off now and we're left with a plain connectivity company, which is exactly what we should've built into something great a decade ago.

Treat their customers with respect instead of contempt. The company spent far too long, and arguably still does, treating their customers as assets to be exploited. Decades of poor customer service and constant rate hikes via things like equipment fee increases creates a hostile customer base that was just waiting for a viable alternative.

Customer service is still a disaster. It’s nearly impossible to talk to an agent, the AI based help line provides limited assistance, and you have to be really persistent to reach an actual human being to address an issue. The large AI investment in customer service has done nothing to improve the customer experience, anyone with half a brain can see that it’s just another way to cut costs and to distance the company from the customers that enable it.

Comcast’s place as one of the most hated companies in the country is well deserved and it will take a truly innovative product to win back a lot of the customers that left as soon as they had the opportunity.

I work close to the ground in this company , so I'll stick to what I've actually seen firsthand. For over 15 years, the company has rebranded itself — new logo, new colors, new mascot, new "bold" campaign — on what feels like a rolling basis. Every year or two, a new brand executive arrives, needs to prove they've "done something," and the identity shifts again. Red to black to multicolor to purple — but none of that ever moved the actual product. Changing the color palette doesn't sell more internet units. Meanwhile, expensive commercials keep rolling out with fresh themes and characters, seemingly disconnected from any real business problem.

Internally, it's not much better. Our tools have never fully worked right. Instead of real fixes, we get patch after patch — Band-Aid solutions that solve one problem while creating two more, so we're constantly stitching things back together just to keep operating.

What we actually needed — better competitive positioning and fixing the friction points customers deal with every day — keeps getting deprioritized. Good ideas from people who understand the market get ki-led for reasons that never quite add up. And more than once, ideas that started in the field or in regional teams resurface later, rebranded as headquarters' own thinking, with no credit to where they came from.

After watching that pattern repeat for years, the drive to push for better has slowly gotten ground down in me. At this point, I mostly keep my head down and do the job. I'm still here — but it's hard to feel optimistic about where things are headed.

I agree—this is the dilemma facing every telco and cable company today: what is the next big thing? For Comcast, I think several things went wrong.

First, Comcast has always viewed new products through the lens of its network footprint. X1 was designed as a better video experience for Comcast customers. Netflix, by contrast, built for anyone in the world who wanted to watch video. That difference in mindset matters. Comcast kept asking how new products could strengthen the network business rather than simply asking what product consumers wanted most.

Second, almost everything had to tie back to broadband. The assumption was that a better video product like X1 would help sell or retain broadband. New businesses and products were rarely allowed to stand completely on their own; ultimately, they had to support the bundle. If they had cut the ties to the network, they could have been the company delivering online-video to everyone.

Third, Comcast was slow to recognize that broadband had fundamentally changed. When subscriber trends weakened in 2022, the explanation was initially that the problem was temporary—fewer moves, unusual market conditions, a bad quarter. I remember a meeting with Dave Watson where the message was essentially, “This is not a video moment. These losses are temporary.” But Comcast was facing something much bigger: consumers increasingly had credible broadband alternatives, and Comcast was no longer the only high-speed option in many of its markets.

Finally, Comcast responded with years of incremental cost cutting instead of making enough bold structural decisions. Why continue significant investment in legacy video and X1 rather than putting it into maintenance mode? Why keep businesses like Xfinity Home instead of selling them to a company where home security is core? Why maintain organizations and initiatives that no longer have a clear path to growth? Instead of decisively eliminating costs, Comcast often spread the cuts across the company and starved every team.

Now it faces pressure across multiple businesses at the same time, while costs cannot come down nearly as fast as the market is changing. The bigger lesson is simple: when innovation is primarily designed to protect the legacy business, eventually the legacy business starts defining—and limiting—what the company can become.

Hired a competent outside CEO and given up controlling the board. Everything else is downstream of C-level leadership. YouTube was ours to invent, so were Netflix, Fubo. Comcast should've been competing with Crowdstrike, Palo Alto Networks in cyber with our headstart in networking. Brian doesn't have the talent or motivation. Daddy built a distribution business and handed to him, he's happy running it by the numbers like a McKinsey corporate drone and stripping assets from his "family business".