It is easy to be a good company when the business is growing. The real colors come out when times are tough. Comcast was good. Enter competition and management denial finally over. Hatchet job and dump employees as fast as you can. Who would rank it good now?
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Well my checks still cash and the work is enjoyable, so they are still a good company. However, not everyone has the same experience and I hope they find something more to their liking.
Well... i think we need to define "good". And for whom.
For the Roberts family who still maintain voting and board control, and are billionaires donating $7.5M to Trump's Ballroom, and funding things like the Barnes? Sure. It's goof to be king.
For all the financial engineers and corporate interests and entities being acquired, split, merged, spun off... agree there, too. It's been good to make a small number of rich people even richer. The true genius of Ralph, Julian and folks like John Malone was in building systems and processes that provided a utility-like, recurring billing businesses. It was about owning infrastructure that generated predictable cash flow, then using that cash flow to acquire more infrastructure... without surrendering ownership.
Being an employee at a company that figured out a monopoly-like structure that generated reliable money endlessly no matter how poorly you treated the customer? Good times. Good pay. Reasonable hours. No real accountability... we didn't need to create better products, or good experiences, because the customers had no alternatives. Until they did. And fled in droves. And here we are.
Has Comcast been good for customers? Well, we can ask them... but get ready for an earful. One of the more amusing things at Comcast is that our CSAT has finally been moving up point or two. We celebrated this. But the truth is that all the customers who left first were the ones that hated us the most. Thus the rise.
The bigger question we are all debating is how good these mega-corporations are for society, and the American people, and if you lean a bit liberal like I do, the world at large. How good is it to have a handful of billionaires and now trillionaires deciding the fate of the world, buying governments, handing legislation to politicians to pass, advocating for systems that look increasingly authoritarian, anti-democratic, and transhuman. Is that good for us? Anyone except them? I guess time will tell.
Corporations and capitalism is not designed for "good," "the public good," or doing what's right. It's about maximizing profit and going right up to the edge of what's illegal to maintain profit, position, and ki-l competition. Libertarians like Malone are clear that he's not about ensuring competion, but the possibility of competition. Which seems a perverted view of free markets when you manipulate markers to not be free. But oddly, his point is being proven as Comcast passes through the end of its lifecycle and is broken up. We were displaced by competitors in a cascade of areas. So, the market did eventually lay us low.
And to go back to the original question: was Comcast a "good" company? Yes, in some ways, for some. But in the last 20+ years under Brian Roberts there has been a true failure of planning to remain competitive. We all saw it. It was raised constantly. And no leader had the ba--s to stand up and advocate for culture and strategy change that could have positioned us at the head of any number of emerging areas. Which in some ways was excusable. We proved ourselves to be incompetent at basic things: we couldn't even launch cloud gaming or a decent smart home hub when we owned the gateways in people's homes, how were we going to compete with real relentless competitors like Amazon, Google, Apple. So perhaps the most logical answer was to cash cow the declining businesses, then do what we're doing now and financial engineer paper gains which are real. I have a personal bias that leaders should lead, face hard facts, take a stand, make stakes clear. But the more rational approach might have been what happened: promote political leaders who don't take risks or put their necks out, keep the cash coming in, and let tomorrow be someone else's problem. Being paid that much money at these higher levels it seems you should do what is hard. But maybe that's why most of us on this board don't ascend to those levels: we don't understand the game, nor what "good" actually is, nor how and when it matters. For all of us, ultimately, it's about ensuring a paycheck so we can pay our mortgage, and hopefully one day retire, while doing something we don't hate. Same for these execs, I guess. If you take risks to ensure our future, you might fail, and that paycheck stops coming.
@OP I guess if it is family controlled, the family can do anything they want. We see the true colors of the Roberts family. I am $ure they will $leep fine.