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Careful what you say! Do you really think they stopped listening to us?! |
Posted on 02/15/2005 7:21:11 AM PST by advance_copy
The fighting entrepreneurial spirit was a hallmark of the man who helped found MCI -- William G. McGowan. McGowan, a financier who was brought in to save the nearly bankrupt MCI Communications Corp., in 1968 was a scrappy fighter determined to take on the giant AT&T, which at that time had monopoly control over all telephone service in the United States.
Early in his bid to offer long-distance service, McGowan concluded that the company needed to be in Washington, where it could monitor its battles in the courts and Congress and before the Federal Communications Commission. Until then, the only telecommunications presence in the area was from Comsat International Inc. and Intelsat Ltd., government-created satellite firms.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I was an original MCI employee back when it was called Microwave Communications Incorporated. We didn't have any switches just private lines from St.Louis to Chicago and Wash DC to New York via Philly.
I'll never forget being at the Philly 1 terminal and having Sheriff deputies knocking on the door demanding entrance to repossess equipment prior to the consent decree.
We called Worthington the General Counsel in DC to ask what we should do. His response, whatever you do don't open the door. We told the deputies under counsels advisement that we were prohibited form opening the door and they went away.
If we had let them in, MCI would have been finished....
NeverGore :^)
Busting up the Ma Bell did irreversible damage to America's lead in the telcom market.
It's cell phones which are destroying the traditional phone companies. Both local telephone and long-distance companies are dying anachronisms, at this point. I read an article yesterday about how colleges are getting rid of their campus phone companies, because something like 90% of incoming freshmen have cell phones, and get free long distance anyway.
1. That is an awesome story about Philly1
2. If MaBell had her way, if it weren't for MCI, we'd still be renting our handset and paying through the nose for long distance calls.
3. The largest cell provider is Verizon (formerly, Bell Atlantic, formerly C&P Telephone, formerly AT&T -- MABELL)
The settlement of the antitrust case (The Modification of Final Judgment or "MFJ" as it became known) occurred under Reagon's DoJ, but the case was actually filed under Carter.
Reagan might have approved of the anti-bureaucrarcy thrust of the break-up, but he probably had little or nothing to do with it.
In practice, it was the brain-child of Judge Greene, and it would not be fair to characterize Judge Greene as being anti-bureaucratic. The MFJ created a lot of nonsensical rules and line of business restrictions on telecommunications companies.
I'm not defending the Bells, and I'm not sure what the answer is. Some wanted a more aggressive enforcement of the UNE-P rules. Personally, I would have welcomed a further break up of the incumbent LECs, stripping the network elements out from service provision.
You are right to separate MCI from the criminal conspiracy known as WorldCom.
MCI, of course, was not all sweetness and light. The company was founded (with the encouragement of the FCC) to exploit opportunities created by regulatory inefficiencies. In the early days, they were known as a law firm with an antenna on top.
MCI could also act like a monopoly when it had the power. They were real tough in negotiating access to their Internet backbone before the merger with WorldCom.
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Careful what you say! Do you really think they stopped listening to us?! |
MCI has almost always had crappy management. Just before I left there, somebody noticed that there were no outages over the holidays... gee, because nobody was doing any work! Instead of paying enough money to keep the good people and dumping the idiots they recruited from bagging groceries, their response was not to allow any work that *might* affect traffic during business hours. Retarded managers who screwed up got promoted or transferred to make somebody else's life miserable because firing an idiot butt-kisser would look like a reversal of a Custer Decision. Over 6 years I saw just about every bad management cliche there was. No surprise to me.
wow!
whatta story.
most people don't remember the monopoly of at&t. it was illegal to hook up alien equipment to your phone line.
The politics of the phone wars are often hard to figure. The most anti-Bell politician I was aware of was Senator Hollings (D-Disney & WorldCom). Other Dems are pro-Bell. Senator Stevens (R-Alaska) is seen as pro-Bell. John McCain has taken money from all sides. An examination of the donations reported on opensecrets.org is very interesting.
When were you there? Before or after Worldcom? Bad management occurs in all large corporations. However, there was a marked decline starting around 1987 when MCI became a true market force. The Entrepreneurial focus left and was replaced by a bureaucratic mess.
BTW, Bernie Ebbers was a reseller customer of mine during the early LDDS days. He would come to Atlanta to visit and sit across from me at the conference table with his cowboy boots propped up. What a piece of work he was.....
NeverGore :^)
I've got a great story about myself and Bill McGowan. If I get time later I'll add it to this thread.
NeverGore :^)
The fact is the Department of Justice has promoted competition in the telecommunications industry under both Republican and Democratic administrations. The AT&T investigation began under the Nixon administration. The suit was filed under the Ford administration. It was pursued through the Carter administration, and it was settled during the Reagan administration. On a bipartisan basis, the Department of Justice, I think, has stood up for the interests of the American consumer, attempting to require and impose a competitive test.
That's a bunch of horse manure. AT&T was holding back the advance of telecommunications technology, because they were more interested in preserving their existing business structure. They even held back their own inventions. They invented ISDN and ADSL in the late sixties. ISDN didn't become widely available till the 1990s. ASDL didn't become widely available till 1999 - 2000. I was one of the first DSL customers in Corpus Christi and had to be on a waiting list to get it when it first became available. It is competition that forced new technologies to become available.
In order to transmit data we'd still be required to buy Western Electric acoustically coupled 300 baud modems from Ma Bell.
There used to be a joke that ISDN stood for "I still don't know." It took the growth of demand for (semi) broadband services before ISDN even achieved modest market success.
One of the problems in rolling out ISDN was that the Bell heads were scared of repeating the Picturephone fiasco of the early 60s.
To my knowledge ADSL was not developed until much later. Bellcore was working on it in the early 1990s; it was called video-on-demand at the time. Again the marketeers were wrong; they did not foresee the 'Net, and thought ADSL would be used to compete with cable.
Sure enough, it only took Bernie a few years to kill what had grown from a few microwave towers to a multinational powerhouse under McGowan.
I have a hardback copy of "The History of MCI" on my bookshelf to remind myself of what it was.
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