

Fake Steve Rails at AT&T - alanthonyc
http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/12/a-not-so-brief-chat-with-randall-stephenson-of-att.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheSecretDiaryOfSteveJobs+%28The+Secret+Diary+of+Steve+Jobs%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

======
shalmanese
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html)

"Bad Idea #1: Site Licenses.

The opposite of segmentation, really. I have certain competitors that do this:
they charge small customers per-user but then there's a "unlimited" license at
a fixed price. This is nutty, because you're giving the biggest price break
precisely to the largest customers, the ones who would be willing to pay you
the most money. Do you really want IBM to buy your software for their 400,000
employees and pay you $2000? Hmm?

As soon as you have an "unlimited" price, you are instantly giving a gigantic
gift of consumer surplus to the least price-sensitive customers who should
have been the cash cows of your business."

On the other hand, consumers massively prefer unmetered services as it avoids
the cognitive tax of figuring out variable pricing.

AT&T is in a weird position here as these two forces are almost exactly
balanced. It can either choose to start metering now and then flip flop a
couple of years later or tough it out until provisioning bandwidth becomes
cheap enough to not meter. Neither of these is an especially appealing
solution.

------
alanthonyc
Pretty on point.

"There was this weird lump in my throat, this tightness in my chest. I had
this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid
and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow
decline."

------
ksowocki
Pretty funny. I lol'ed the whole way through.

All joke aside though, what kind of company makes a move like that to f*ck
their early adopters? That can't be good for business, not matter WHAT the
numbers look like.

~~~
jcromartie
At every turn AT&T seems to be actively hostile towards their users. I hope
they don't think they are fooling anybody with their "Mark The Spot" bullshit.
You want to know what part of your network sucks? It's simple: ALL OF IT.
EVERYWHERE.

It's that simple! Just fix EVERYTHING and it might feel more like I'm getting
something for my money. Fix the dropped calls, periods where I can't make
calls, surprise voicemails, non-playing voicemails, SMS disappearing into the
void, vacillating 3G signal strength... and then maybe people wouldn't feel
like they are getting raped.

~~~
pasbesoin
The only thing that (finally) got them to accelerate the roll out of DSL in
Illinois was Comcast and the other cable companies beginning to eat their
lunch.

After 6 years in a community of several hundred residences less than two miles
from a town that does have DSL service, they still couldn't be bothered to
drop in a local junction (I'm forgetting my terminology; whatever box it is
that can take the place of a local switching center these days in providing
DSL service) so that I and my neighbors would be within what they consider an
acceptable range for service. This was a couple of years ago; I haven't
bothered to check since.

A few towns further downstate finally got so frustrated that they made plans
to roll their own connectivity. AT&T took them to court and lobbied the state
legislature to prevent them from proceeding.

Back before my last move, I had DSL from SBC (maybe at that time still
Ameritech/SBC; and which has since purchased the AT&T name). Phoning up to
place the order, the call was answered within a few seconds. Installation
itself took three scheduled visits, each requiring a half-day window of my
availability (so, off from work), before someone actually showed up to fill
the order. Then, they did an absolute crap job, leaving a bare wire-to-wire
connection hanging on the ouside of the building. My downstairs neighbor had a
friend stop by who was an actual line technician for the telephony part of
SBC. That fellow was kind enough to go up and clean up and tape over that
connection, as a favor to his friend. Turns out the DSL installers they were
sending out were subcontractors.

After that, connectivity would go down frequently. When it was up, traceroute
would show a _blank_ -awful lot of bouncing around SBC servers (sometimes
close to 10, perhaps more) before a request escaped to the internet. One time
when I called for service, I reached a nice support tech who was at the point
of boiling over (at the situation, not me). She described how they were
subcontractors who filed tickets that were then serviced by other
subcontractors (IIRC). When people called up, there was literally nothing more
she could do than file a ticket, and she could get no further feedback on the
status of that ticket.

I ended up spending about thirty minutes talking to her as she calmed down. It
didn't matter with respect to her keeping her job; she'd decided to leave her
position the following week. I feel a little guilty that this tied her up, but
she just needed someone to vent to after banging her head against the
proverbial wall of SBC tech support for too long.

SBC, now AT&T, is one of the few companies I have an immediate aversion to
giving any business whatsoever. I know some individual employees who are just
fine. But management, particularly senior management and the policies they
promulgate, are simply evil.

I hesitate a bit to post this. HN generally isn't a place I consider griping
appropriate. But this company's behavior serves such an exemplary role of how
_not_ to do business (unless you are a de facto regional monopoly (as they
were at that time) and part of a national oligarchy), that it is perhaps
instructional.

Oh, and it's been a while, but IIRC SBC was given many millions of dollars in
concessions and dismissal of legal charges, in return for their agreement,
among other things, to accelerate and thoroughly roll out statewide high speed
Internet (DSL). The above description is an example of how they failed to
honor this commitment. Instead, they spent their time lobbying the state
legislature to have the terms of the agreement altered to exempt them from
having to honor it. One example of another lesson demonstrated repeatedly in
the state and region: Such concessions, tax breaks, etc. rarely pay off for
the states and communities that make them.

I have no great love for any of the major telcos, nor the major cable
companies (shudder), but the Death Star is in a class unto itself.

