Sunday, March 05, 2006

The BAT&TMAN TOWER

AT&T to buy BellSouth for $67 billion:

"After spending millions of dollars to rebrand AT&T Wireless Services Inc. stores as Cingular stores and hundreds of millions of dollars more on marketing the new Cingular after its $41 billion acquisition of AT&T Wireless in October 2004, Cingular will now become AT&T if the merger with BellSouth is completed.

The BellSouth name also would be absorbed in the deal.

“It’s going to be confusing,” said industry analyst Jeff Kagan. “This is the reinvention of the telecommunications industry.



Confusing. You can bet on it. What a fascinating story, though. The tele-communications industry has alwasy been fascinating to me since the early days of Bernie Ebbers (with all of his Nashville connections via Diana Day, etc) plus just the fact that LDDS (remember them, this is the precursor of MCI , after Worldcom) grew up down here in the South before the oh-so-well-known crash. Before the bad stuff happened, the New York analysts were scratching their heads over the incredible returns that Bernie and Co (by that time MCI) was posting on the Street. By the way, how in the heck did Bernie Ebbers get convicted of a crime and yet, Richard Scrushy is running around preaching in Birmingham? This makes no sense to me, b/c he is guilty as hell, but back to topic....No one could understand how MCI was doing a 20% return and then, there was AT&T (they were all in the same copper long distance business) returning about 7-8% at the time. Totally perplexing to management and analysts at the time--Same business, same rates, how could AT&T be losing so much margin??? Those numbers single handedly forced Michael Armstrong (then CEO of AT&T) to venture outside of t/c and start buying cable companies amongst other things to lift his bottom line. What a disaster. Little did he realize that MCI was cooking the books. AT&T almost went under. I suppose their is justice in the business world every now and then with this announcement today, although management and ownership (back to confusing) has changed quite dramatically. But, the good ole' guy, AT&T, is now back in big big way. We'll miss our downtown Nashville BellSouth tower , but it will be re-branded to reflect the acquisition.
Welcome back AT&T! Just treat our Nashville Bell South folks with care!

Thanks for the weekend release--sure to miss Prime Time

Associated Press clarifies what Bush was told about levee breaches in New Orleans.

Clearly, President Bush was in the loop and did not flippantly dis-regard the situation in New Orleans as was surmised or as was the intention of the Bush bashing party last week by the media.

Tropical Storm In March?

Click on this link (from USA TODAY)
... and you can see the satellite image of the storm that is just north of Cuba. No further strengthening is expected, but this is a highly unusual occurrence.

Dung Pressure Makes Gas

Wired News:


That is indeed the headline of this article. Well, maybe a little editorialism, but not a great deal. 'Nuff said..