Re: MCI Accepts Worldcom's Bid? ; charset=us-ascii
On Mon, 10 Nov 1997, Karl Denninger wrote:
Frankly, this could be a *good* thing for the industry. Among other things large organizations have a habit and history of being unable to perceive and act on market-based changes quickly enough to capitalize on them.
They tend to act like 900lb Gorillas instead, which is great if you're into slow, plodding things, and not so good if you aren't fast enough to get stepped on. But eventually, stepping on people draws the fire of people on the DOJ side of the fence.
I agree, I think this is a good thing for many NSPs. It is going to be a HUGE job to combine UUNET, ANS, and Internet MCI. They have huge hardware differences. ANS with the new BAY BCN hardware that they spent a large time developing, MCI with their large Stratacom network, and UUNet with their new Fore network. They all connect customers in a different way, it will take some time to bring all of that together. There will be major outages and problems associated with this merger. It will be a big change for other backbone providers to come in a take some of their customers base. It also will be easier to watch 1 big gorilla then 3 smaller ones.
-Nathan
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? -Steve.
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?
ANS just happened a little while ago so theres not really been much time for wide scale integration. As for MFS and UUNet, well I tend to think that UUNet pretty well had to stand on its own when worldcomm picked them up. (How do you integrate an internet company with a telco? easiest just to let them be a branch off the telco.) As for MFS, they become the "local" portion of worldcomm.
From my perspective, with the original combination of worldcomm/mfs/uunet, there were three very logical divisions. The biggest hole is the sales and etc not being merged propperly (causing lots of headaches for lots of people.) I suspect there will be a much greater effort to merge ANS with UUNet and, once thats more or less complete MCI's network will get sucked into the result. (I think it may be easier for uunet and ans to become joined than it will be for ans and mci.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Wayne Bouchard GlobalCenter web@primenet.com Primenet Network Operations Internet Solutions for (602) 416-6422 800-373-2499 x6422 Growing Businesses FAX: (602) 416-9422 http://www.primenet.com http://www.globalcenter.net ----------------------------------------------------------------------
===== Wayne Bouchard previously 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?
Maybe. Well Chrysler has Dodge Caravan, Plymouth Voyage and yet Chrysler Town and Country... :-) Jun
On Mon, 10 Nov 1997, Steve Carter 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?
-Steve.
I don't think so. They may try different target markets, but the cost savings of merging the internet networks is very big. Yes it is a good idea to make MFS and UUNet separate divisions, because they work better that way. I think you will see MFS + Brooks as one unit and UUNet + ANS + internetMCI as one unit. P.S. In that last messages I said that internetMCI was using Stratacom, they are actually using Fore. -Nathan
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. 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). Scary. Eric Carroll eric.carroll@acm.org Tekton Internet Associates
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
participants (6)
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Eric M. Carroll -
Jeffrey C. Ollie -
Jun Wu -
Nathan Stratton -
Steve Carter -
Wayne Bouchard