Word: maing
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...plan calls for Ma Bell to be divided into four distinct companies: AT&T Business Services, AT&T Consumer Services, AT&T Broadband and AT&T Wireless. That's a lot of slicing and dicing, but it gets even more complicated. Some of the new companies will start off as "tracking stocks," meaning they're independent in name only. AT&T Business will become the parent of AT&T Consumer. And the whole thing will take two years to happen...
...direction comes at a dark time for Ma Bell. Since its founding in 1885 as the long-distance arm of the American Bell Telephone Co., AT&T has held a privileged position in the U.S. economy. With its control of the nation's phone grid, it was largely insulated from competition. That deprived consumers of choice. ("We don't care," Lily Tomlin's Ernestine the Operator used to explain. "We don't have to. We're the phone company.") It also made the company's stock such a sound investment that it became famous as the stock of choice...
...lucrative local phone operations, now the Baby Bells. More recently, stiff competition from WorldCom, Sprint, the Baby Bells and wireless has been driving the profit out of the long-distance business--which still accounts for as much as 65% of AT&T's more than $62 billion in revenue. Ma Bell, which had been charging 15[cents] a minute for calls, suddenly found itself competing with rates as low as 4[cents] a minute. In this year's third quarter, AT&T's profits fell 19.4% from a year ago, to $1.3 billion...
...lucrative areas. He moved aggressively into cable, plunking down $115 billion to build the nation's biggest cable network. Armstrong has also pushed into fast-growing areas like wireless and has tried to turn AT&T's WorldNet into a rival of AOL's. The ultimate vision was that Ma Bell would clean up by cross-selling its 80 million customers a bundle of telephone, cable and Internet services...
Breaking up has worked in the past. Ma Bell's dizzying array of spin-offs, including the regional Bell companies in 1984 and Lucent and others in the '90s, have mostly done well by being good businesses to start with and then being set free to raise capital, allocate resources independently and enter new markets as they liked...