Al Lewis, business columnist for the Denver Post, pointed out an unanticipated consequence of the Cingular and Vodafone bidding war for AT&T Wireless: the death of AT&T as a viable brand. With its wireless assets now melded into Cingular and AT&T Broadband as a vanished element within Comcast, the only thing left bearing the hatched-globe logo is a boring circuit-switched long-haul network.
Cynics might say the time-division multiple access patchwork of AT&T Wireless had become so synonymous with "dropped call" that it gave AT&T reverse-brand equity. Agreed. But when a mighty brand is chopped up bit by bit, it's depressing to see even a crippled player vanish.
We in hardware engineering have seen this before. The Western Electric side of AT&T had fans, but Lucent Technologies was a powerhouse for a few years. The conversion of microelectronics assets from Lucent to Agere helped the semiconductor company, and Agere now has a certain cachet its predecessors lacked. Meanwhile, though, Lucent loses its enterprise play through the creation of Avaya; has to augment its routing talents with Juniper deals; and the AT&T roots of the entire operation are lost to antiquity.
In the heat of the 1990s incentive bidding war, brands were taken apart with little thought of the consequences. Sure, Cabletron Systems had as many detractors as fans, but people knew the name. How many in 2004 can name all of Cabletron's successor companies, except perhaps for Riverstone Networks, known more for its financial troubles than its continued excellence in Layer 3 switching?
With business improving, prepare for new spin-offs, beginning with the Motorola Semiconductor metamorphosis to Freescale. I hope that Freescale does at least as well in its transition as Agere did in losing its AT&T and Lucent roots. I also hope the familiar jagged "M" of Motorola never goes away in the wireless and embedded-computer worlds.
It's probably too late for AT&T, however. No brand lasts forever, and it may be time for the progeny of Alexander Graham Bell to be laid to rest. I just hope that the demise of old brands does not lead to more corporate names that end in "a" and sound like a foreign sports car. And I join Al Lewis in pointing out that when a brand dies slowly through a thousand cuts, almost no one mourns its passing.
Loring Wirbel is Communications editorial director for EE Times and its network publications.
