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U.S. DOJ Moves To Block MCI/Sprint Merger
Janthkin writes: "It seems the U.S. isn't going to allow MCI and Sprint to merge after all, so they WON'T be creating 'a telecommunications and Internet giant, one that would carry more data traffic than any other carrier and that would have left the U.S. long-distance market with only two major competitors instead of three.' (Text from the Standard story here). CNN coverage here." The U.S. side of the merger is not completely ruled out, but this seems a strong blow against it.
In 1998, being a hacker fresh out of college with sheepskin in hand, I received a job at MCI. My background was information security; MCI was interested in me for that, but the unofficial corporate policy was that everyone in the UNIX development team (which InfoSec was part of, don't ask me why) had to spend six months in an unrelated IT field.
It was a reasonably sensible requirement; it ensured that everyone in their InfoSec department had experience with the company's IT infrastructure and it would give the InfoSec group a large skill pool to draw upon. So I took the first job I could get in their IT department, intending on getting a transfer in six months. I wound up as (gasp, horrors) a mainframe QA engineer.
MCI was finishing up the MCI-WorldCom "merger". Don't let it fool you--it wasn't a merger at all. MCI was bought, lock stock and barrel. Bernie Ebbers (the chief of WorldCom) took control and the bloodletting began. In the space of one afternoon, my department lost about a quarter of its headcount. The guy in the cube next to me received his termination notice via email--at ten o'clock in the morning he was fired, and by one o'clock that afternoon he was gone.
We survivors were told that there would be no more layoffs for (I forget--several months). Not too much later, a few weeks, I noticed that a lot of our workforce was all leaving the building at the same time, carrying boxes of stuff. Bernie Ebbers kept his promise--there weren't any layoffs that day. It was just that a few dozen contractors were informed that their contracts would not be renewed, even though they were desperately needed for the success of the projects they were working on.
The corporate culture changed dramatically. The work week was 36 hours when I arrived there; MCI corporate management felt it was important to keep its engineers happy, so they gave us Friday afternoons off. After the WorldCom merger it shot up to 40, then 44 hours; at one point (in mid-1999), my manager told me that the company was expecting 55-hour weeks from me for the next six weeks. Y2K work and all.
Between the constant threat of layoffs, the punishing working conditions, the lack of respect from management, the uncertainty surrounding WorldCom's intentions for MCI and everything else, I decided to get the hell out of Dodge.
It just wasn't worth it for $38,760 a year.
Lesson here: WorldCom is not a friendly business. If this buyout of Sprint is anything like the MCI buyout, Sprint will be decimated in order to make sure it gets in line with WorldCom. This will hurt consumers; it homogenizes the market and stifles the competitive spirit that makes the marketplace go 'round.
While I was at MCI, we were strongly motivated to get the cool stuff done before Sprint could beat us to the punch. It was one part profit motive (stock options) and two parts ego (we wanted bragging rights). It was an effective way of getting us to work hard, and in the end, the consumer benefited.
If the DOJ hadn't stepped in, MCI would have become Sprint, and a lot of that fierce competitiveness would have gone away.
WorldCom is growing far too large, far too quickly. Sometime look at just how many telecommunications companies they've bought out in the last ten years.
-- I'm posting anonymously not because I'm an AC, but because I don't want to get sued by WorldCom. I don't know if they'd sue or not, but considering how draconian their nondisclosure policy was right after the MCI buyout, I'd rather play it safe rather than sorry.
You keep hacking at it; splicing it; chopping it up; melting it; freezing it; splitting it up. Nothing works. At best, you manage to break it into dozens of small chunks, but before you know it, they've instinctively re-assimilated into the original unstoppable body of the T-1000.
I'm tired of dealing with phone companies. They're one of the few commercial (non government) entities who really could care less about their customers. They don't even attempt to convey the appearence that they care about you. Just give them your money, shut the fuck up, and they'll get around to establishing your phone service when they are good and ready.
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seumas.com