“Say what ya want about Greene, but he helped protect the workers from some of the hair-brained pipe dreams of management. “
I liked what Judge Greene did! I paved the way for outside businesses to get into the Fiber-to-the-home business. It’s just that the mindset in the “Bell System” was and is, to this day, that it’s a private fiefdom. When the RBOCs were cut loose, they actually did business with private companies to deliver the first fiber systems to their subscribers. I was involved in one of them. But always in the back ground was AT&T trying to f*ck things up in their attempt to stay in business without any competition for the technology. In the Bell System, nobody wants to be first, and nobody wants to be last, so at least with several of the RBOCs (Bell South was a big one) aggressively looking to launch new technology, there was for a time, a forcing function.
100% correct. I spent 5 years with ABI, ATTIS and Lucent watching management destroy what could have been a good, viable company with a knowledgable, willing workforce. I can't tell you the number of meetings I attended or tapes I viewed where the phrase, "We welcome the competition" was uttered. It got so bad that workers would burst out in guffaws whenever it was heard.
As inept as the management had become in NYNEX by the time I returned in 92, it was a damned sight better than what I had left at ATT/Lucent.