Thread regarding Comcast layoffs

Am I missing something? Look at the track record:

1. Unify Care and strip local flexibility
2. Retire the divisions and centralize operational control at HQ
3. Watch sub losses hit record highs and the stock tank into the low $20s

Now, instead of admitting that gutting us already broke the customer experience, leadership brings in McKinsey to delayer HQ and blame "middle management friction." Classic corporate playbook: collect bonuses for centralizing, and when sub retention plummets, pass the bill down to the rest of the org.

The way Comcast is bleeding the business and restructuring every 6-8 weeks (quietly or in mass), it would shock me if there wasn’t a sale or merger. The company has been run into the ground like a soon-to-be cautionary tale and I’m unsure it can be salvaged. They’ve essentially isolated anyone beneficial to grow their bottom line: they’ve treated customers like trash despite suspicious billing complaints, IVR complaints, customer call service complaints, unexplained hikes. -They tried to force their beliefs customers would just deal with it because the folks at the top are always right and unable to grip they could be wrong. Then they’ve isolated their employees by allowing bullying, abuse, cronyism, talent cuts > best friend retentions, ignored HR complaints, and allowed cost cuts into a lack of resources. -They tried to force their beliefs that their covert sociopathic best friends who majored in yoga and basket weaving could lead teams over folks with the rights certs, education, experience, and EQ. For every cut they make, that’s more testimony from employees to their friends and family and personal stakeholders of a bad business not to deal with. Then they isolated businesses by being too salesy and pushy while also isolating major public and government deals by putting too many known lazy and rude people who the public distrusts as the frontline faces. There are some good eggs in the groups and I’ve seen them but there are more bad apples and in a year or two, it wouldn’t surprise me if the remaining good eggs are laid off. Comcast needs to cut senior leaders, maybe even rebrand the name bc it comes with a bad connotation to many customers, and use the billions they’re saving to supplement the rate cuts that need to happen if they want to be competitive. Instead they just complain that the competitors are unrealistic but they’re holding out just fine to me and complaining isn’t stopping OUR bleed. But Comcast won’t because the pattern is it’s run by entitled people who aren’t used to being wrong so they will continue to wear blinders to match their belief that what they want to be is true is true.

@a9 Fair point, that's actually the deeper version of it. If every core product is declining and wireless is capped by a shrinking broadband base, cost cuts were never going to be a growth answer anyway. That's a margin answer dressed up as one. If nobody actually has an answer for where growth comes from, that's the real problem, and no amount of trimming the org chart fixes it.

I’m genuinely curious if there's a growth thesis internally that just hasn't gone public yet, or if "cost discipline while we figure it out" is actually the whole plan.

@a7 I agree the problem goes much deeper than cost cuts. Almost every major product line is now in structural decline.

Cable TV has lost roughly two-thirds of its customers over the last 15 years. Landline voice is effectively a dead product. Broadband, historically the engine of the company, is now facing competition it never had before: fiber, fixed wireless, and eventually much more capable satellite.

Even Comcast Business has been losing customers for years; the company simply stopped separately reporting those losses this year, and what I’m hearing internally isn’t encouraging.

Wireless is the one clear growth business, but it’s a thin-margin product tied heavily to the broadband base. If broadband customers keep shrinking, there’s a natural ceiling on wireless growth too.

That’s why this isn’t fundamentally a cost problem. Comcast is trying to make a shrinking portfolio more efficient when the much bigger question is: where does meaningful growth come from?

Let’s use critical thinking.

So who actually benefits here? Not the customer, nothing changes for them either way. Not really the shareholder, margin on a shrinking base is still shrinking, and the stock already showed what it prices. Not even the M&A story, if this is supposed to set the company up to be acquired or merged, buyers pay a premium for stable customers, not lean overhead, so a shrinking subscriber base actually weakens that position instead of strengthening it. The only group that possibly comes out ahead is ….you guessed it…whoever's still sitting in the room if this ends in a sale. Worth asking out loud, even if nobody's saying it directly.

@a5 Possible and the Streets speculated about it since the spinoff was announced. I'm less focused on where this ends up structurally and more on the fact that nothing in the plan as described touches subscriber retention or pricing. That's true whether it ends in a merger or not.

We’re most likely merging or acquiring a company.