Lucent: Down But Not Out

Frisky070802 writes "Forbes has an article about the "new" Lucent. It discusses how Lucent is trying to follow in the path of IBM by transforming itself from an equipment provider to a provider of services, even to companies using equipment from competitors. Patricia Russo, the CEO, claims that Lucent has turned the corner and proven it can survive. The article quotes a few statistics on just what has survived: for instance, revenues down from $28.9B in FY2000 to an expected $8.9B in FY2004, and headcount dropping from 157K to 32.5K over that time." Lucent has fascinated me, simply because they were so well setup, but then floundered for *years*, but have a great amount of interesting technology at their core.

Comments

Re:Blame "The Angel Of Death"

[arivanov]

It is not just Fionna. It is a flock of executives. We had a head of engineering transplanted from there in one of my previous jobs. The creature f**ked up the department in less then 3 months and was one of the very few which were ever ejected from the company in those days (top of the boom). He was "retired to spend more time with his family".

From day the transplanted lucent abomination started going around with an "outsourcing checklist" without even trying to understand the fact that we have just about enough staff to either define the requirements or write bespoke stuff to plug holes without defininig requirements (basically write as we go along). He never actually understood this. He never had any other ideas on how to do things either. Classic example of a person without any clue in software development. Believe it or not he was the head of Lucent reqional R&D before being transplanted.

He provided me with an insight of what happened to lucent. Lucent was the first company to outsource massively its software development arond 1997. It did this as a "cost saving measure" without retaining people to define the requirements and design what the outsourcers have to do. As a result from 1st company in VOIP it promptly went off the radar screen. Same thing happened in many other areas. Basically Lucents's woes are selfinflicted and they are a classic example on how not to outsource.