Word: seidenberg
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Perhaps you saw Ivan Seidenberg back in the 1960s when he got his start working for New York Telephone. Those were the good old days of telecommunications, when "phone company" and "AT&T" were synonyms. Interstate calls cost a small fortune. Copper wires, pioneered by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, were still state of the art. And Seidenberg was the guy you might have spotted crawling into manholes in New York City and cheerfully splicing phone lines together deep underground--peeling back the rubber coating on the finger-thick wires, laying the cable on the splicer and then gently pressing...
Last year Seidenberg made $8.5 million in salary and bonus. Letters that spooled from the fax in his office at Bell Atlantic generally addressed him as "Dear Vice Chairman." For the past half decade, Seidenberg, 51, has been working to make that copper sing and dance with stuff no one could have dreamed of in 1966--video, for instance, or 3-D Web pages. He is also making that copper work closely with its successor: hair-thin fiber-optic cables that offer vastly expanded speed and capacity--which translates to consumer value and, he hopes, corporate profit. Seidenberg, who oversaw...
That should be good for consumer service and savings. Even Bell Atlantic's Seidenberg has said, to FORTUNE magazine, that he foresees a world where, rather than pay for phone calls by the minute, "people will in effect just pay a subscription rate to have access to a network." And while all-you-can-talk (or watch, or surf) lines could be a dream for consumers, they will be a nightmare for the mega-Bells, which must add new subscribers faster than they lose revenue to new competitors and pricing pressures. Some firms, like AT&T, hope to find lucre...
...surely a new world, and the signs are not just global. Even those old New York manholes where Seidenberg spent his youth are changing. Once threaded with a few Bell Atlantic cables, they are now knitted by dozens of other "local loops" from competing firms--proof that at the end of the day, there may be only one set of guys who are guaranteed to profit in this new telecom world: the cable splicers...
...this good news for anyone other than, say, five or six giant phone companies? "The world will be a much simpler place for consumers," argues NYNEX's Seidenberg, "with more choices, more services and more products united under a single roof and unified brand." Seidenberg says phone bills should deflate as the companies merge their billing and cut their labor costs; thousands of jobs will be downsized in the Bell Atlantic/NYNEX upsizing...