Eric M. Carroll wrote:
Pessimist Nathan? I seems to me that it would be out of character for Worldcom to integrate MCI. They didn't with MFS, ANS or UUNet. Different market targets?
If you do not integrate them, then you do not get the economies of scale. Thus your stock price fails to rise, and shareholders get annoyed, since that is what they are approving the deal based on.
I've been following (and occasionally participating in) the discussion on the "Appraising Microsoft" mailing list. Microsoft (I hope) has nothing to do with this but I've gleaned some interesting tidbits out of the discussion regarding anti-trust and very large companies. It would seem that quite a bit of research indicates that increasing scale past a certain point does not give you any additional economies. For more information, see: <http://webpages.metrolink.net/~cmueller/> especially the antitrust overview.
And if you think the backbone is tough, just give a thought to all the different provisioning systems running around. You will need a very sophisticated system to deal with all the "legacy" gear (for some definition of legacy).
Definitely not a job that I'd want... Jeff