Goodbye T-Mobile Girl

I miss Catherine telling me to get some er, more actually...

Craig, she's a gorgeous lady.

Trimph, yeah, I see this a lot. 

It frustrates me how companies seek to grow BIGGER so that they can "save money".  Huh?  Explain to me how becoming a behemoth (or an even bigger behemoth) makes you more efficient.  I feel like gagging when I hear of two companies who both lose money thinking that after the merger they will make anything other than ONE BIG COMPANY that LOSES MONEY.

An investing relative of mine once offered up a kernel of genius that I will never forget:

"If somebody comes to you and asks you to buy his company, you should be suspicious about why he wants to sell it since it's supposedly such a great deal for him."

And my own observations about mergers can pretty much be summed up like this:

IBM got slower and sloth like when they got big.
Microsoft got slower and slovenly when they got big.
Hewlett Packard fell off the map when they went on a buying spree that included Compaq in 2001.
General Motors bought way too many divisions.
Chrysler and Daimler?  Puh-lease!
But the fun one to watch was AOL and Time-Warner.  They both deserved to go under for pulling that boner.

Mergers may just be the corporate version of mental illness.

But this one will be funny:  Flo, the Progressive Insurance Girl will eventually buy the Geico Gecko and the AFLAC Duck in an all-stock deal right before moving in with the Allstate Mayhem Guy.

Yeah, I went with a Droid X on Verizon last year.  Now they have the iPhone but I'm still digging my Droid.

About 20 years ago when I started my business, the big scare was the phone company monopoly's. ATT had just been broken up and the "baby bells" were all pushing for laws to allow them to do certain things that the alarm industry was deathly afraid of. All fear mongering... cause it never happened. I think it was too expensive for the phone companies to move into our turf. So life went on.....

It's a cycle...... the Big break up into smaller ones either by market forces or laws....then slowly they start building the big company back again with market forces and laws. We're in the building stages again.

I was with Alltel, and really liked the service. I have had the same cell number for almost 20 years, and have seen the original company get bought out about 5 times, most recently by Verizon. Same deal on the home/business lines.... About every 5 years there is a buyout. They say for better service and lower prices. All I see are higher bills.... service is about the same...... well the only thing that HAS changed is about 10 years ago when they finally got DSL out here to the sticks..... no more dialup.  My phone bill jumped about $40 when I sighed up for that. But it's worth it.... right?

Guitarhacker


I was with Alltel, and really liked the service. I have had the same cell number for almost 20 years, and have seen the original company get bought out about 5 times, most recently by Verizon. 

Now THAT sounds familiar!  I had two jobs like that (almost 16 years worth), the first ended up with three different names, and the second was as a consultant to Anderson Consulting (who became Accenture) on a Verizon Wireless contract.  What started as Pac-Tel Cellular, became AirTouch, then VodaFone and, finally, Verizon Wireless.  It kept people employed just changing the branding!