Lowell McAdam and a half dozen top executives decided to pay 130 BILLION dollars (of borrowed money) for Vodaphone's interest in Verizon wireless, not forseeing that price wars would make this deal almost profitless. So, how will the golden boys in the ivory tower deal with this screwup? Easy, sell assets like crazy, layoff good people like crazy, and attempt to take away pensions and savings plans from the workers that they cannot layoff. Take notice that the executives never have to worry about this same stuff that keeps the working peons up at night. While you take a paycut or get laid off, they get a 16% raise per year for making bad decisions. The icing on the cake is that there is a a whole system in place to keep the stupid working class fools fighting with each other, rather than laying blame on the correct people. The American working class loves nothing better that fighting with each other over whether Dems or Republicans stink, or whether union members are communists, etc. while the correct way to frame the issue should be "working stiff" VS "immoral big money".
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Verizon actually saved more that $1.6B per when VOD was bought out(payments to VOD or missed opportunities due to VOD). Look it up. An argument can be made that ATT's saving grace will be that all the population growth in their Southern territories means additional revenue to help them survive this industry convergence. Verizon is trying to ensure its still a viable company in 2023. Many folks are praying that Lowell and his leadership team make the right choices.
End of month layoffs scheduled. 50% contractors and 25% more FTE to be let go
LOWELL & Shankar are ruining Wireless. Merging & bringing over leadership from CMB that have no clue how to deliver quality applications & services. You only need to be Indian and in the Texas location to get a leadership position now, no actual skills required.
Focusing on DevOPS only when we can't even code for functional flows because they always break after new code is deployed. We aren't Google, FB, Amazon, Apple. Daily productuon deploys in near duture plans. Scared to think how messed up out site will be then. We cant compare ourselves to GOOGLE. We waste so much money & resources on stupid ideas. We are a wireless & service provider.
It's only a few weeks longer before 97% of Shankar's org will be of ALL Indian decent also. All negro, Caucasian & Latino people will be laid off end of 1st qtr.
Shankar, Ashok, Rajeev, Krishna, SaiVivek, Damu, Amit, Srini, Krishna, Madhu, Venkat maybe if the rest of us are lucky you'll be replaced by a VDSI resource.
Dark fiber is taking over wireline, slowly and expensively. In other areas you have comcast,sudden link,att,time warner,Edison, small resellers, microwave options, and yes vzb. Maybe in New York there is only one provider, but outside of your bubble not much of vzw is riding over vzb.
@FgHuwOD-rnc. Jack Welsh was a big believer in Six Sigma. He used it and ran GE into the ground, loosing focus on his core business, just like Lowell. Jack lost half his fortune when he started screwing his biographer who looks more like his daughter, and his wife took him to the cleaners. Arrogance meets pride and the mighty fall. I'm sure it will be Lowell's turn soon.
llr you are correct, our leader wants to be a Facebook, Google,Yahoo guy. Instead of doing what we do best we dabble in stuff we know nothing about.HUM, really, what the heck was that about.
OD-rnc it is just that the current crop is foolishly embarrassed to be in the real, and profitable business of communications and infrastructure, which is unfortunately not sexy enough for the Google and Facebook wannabees running the store.
Well said tky it is funny how many VZW peeps don't have a clue what and who transports VZW traffic.
The stars lined up as they had never lined up before, affording, yes affording VZ its golden opportunity to buy out VOD. The company was already in a defacto uneasy merger with VOD and the only way out was a buy out, but the cost of borrowing or in stock would have been too expensive. Then corporate rates dropped to unbelievable rates, and the deal was done.
That is not the problem. The problem is leadership. Buying out VOD was brilliant! So was the towers deal. Foolish was buying MCI. Foolish was buying Terramark. Foolish was buying Hughes Telematics. Foolish was buying AOL
It is interesting that the current mantra in BR is to follow the tennets of GE's former CEO Jack Welch. However, critical to Welch's investment philosophy is that "if you can't be Number 1 or Number 2 in any business, then don't be in it."
VZ and predecessors have been continually top players throughout their history. Their problems begin whenever they buy inferior assets and try to repackage the same ineriority. It is just like trying to put lipstick on a pig. It is still a pig.
We are out of work, and the company is out of money, because it has far too many pig assets to support. Anything mulitplied by zero is still zero.
@unm, Yeah sure, everything is dead but wireless, except that wireless doesn't exist without the wireline backbone network. You can't make this stuff up.
If VZ didn't buy VZW, VZ would be out of business by 2017. Wirelines, FIOS, AOL (and telex) are dead, and buried in the ground. Me, 25 years at VZW, now unemployed.