Why did AT&T need T-Mobile so badly

In 1983 AT&T was broken up because it was seen as an Anti Trust issue. Over the next twenty years technology have turned the industry on its head. A move from Physical Plain Old Telephone (POT) lines using a TDM backbone to a mainly wireless and IP driven backbone. So why do we now have a huge company called AT&T. You can thank Steve Jobs in part because the Iphone gave AT&T a huge edge in competition. If you remember the 1984 Apple commercial, it was like Steve Jobs instead of taking a sledge hammer to the tyrant. Rather Steve walked up to the tyrant and handed him the golden key and got a huge pay off. Now AT&T is loosing the POT market to people going wireless only, it is no longer has the IPhone as a competitive edge. It is faced with a huge problem, with faster wireless data backbones it is just a matter of time that people bypass the Cellular phone network and go directly to VOIP on their cell phones. That why you've seen those unlimited plans since this a preemptive move to stop somebody turning a 2 GB data plan is 2100 minutes of 16kbps compressed VOIP traffic. It's hard to charge a $100 dollars a month when you are using just $30 dollar data plan worth of connectivity. We've seen moves to third party providers such a Cricket or Simple mobile start to drive prices down with competition. A lot of these providers use the T-Mobile and Sprint networks to provide their service. If AT&T can create an oligopoly between itself and Verizon it stands a good chance of blocking the move to the commoditization of wireless services. This will put the USA at a huge competitive disadvantage it the infrastructure that powers the next fifty years of growth is in the hands of a few companies trying to maximize profit by creating an artificial scarcity of wired and wireless data networks. The only real solution to this problem is to break up the vertical integration of both phone and cable companies. Separate the infrastructure from the product by having a matrix of product providers and infrastructure providers to create a low cost generic solution. A product driven by separating the content from the transport providers. A simple calculation is $100 per month two year contact with a $200 iphone is $2,600. A $40 dollar per month plan with a $600 phone is $1,560. You are paying over $1,000 dollars more for that phone given the current system. Can you see why AT&T will spend $39 Billion. With 100 million customers with a $500 premium is $50 billion dollars of profit per year. Why is nobody crying fowl in Washington except the Justice department and FFC. Well AT&T is one of the largest political/lobbyists in the DC area. The fact that AT&T went ahead with a merger so much not in the public good shows how little they thought of the current political system.

Windows 8

I've been using Windows 8 a lot. Corporate America will total ignore this release and given that most large corporations of on a 3 to 5 year upgrade cycle on Windows Desktops and most are still fighting too upgrade from XP to windows 7. Its not surprising, they totally skipped Vista and they will totally skip Windows 8. Microsoft does not care since that's not who this version of Windows is aimed at. Like Vista which was a painful upgrade of the windows internals, windows 8 is another painful upgrade but of the interface. Microsoft has several problems to deal with. The rise of the ARM architecture, the touch interface and the death of the "windows" interface on tablet devices (or still birth). Windows has quotes because I'm talking about the UI style rather than the OS. Tablet are not about multi tasking, or a desktop experience they are about a different model of computing. Tablets have a place in business but not replacing desktops. Laptops yes but not desktops. It will take another generation before these models will co exist happily in the same OS, but remember that Windows Server and Window 7 have the same code base.

Should the saying go "Too Big To Succeed"

I was listening to a horror story on the radio about a family who was foreclosed on by a large bank due to problem with the paper work. By the time the mistakes where discovered the house was horribly damaged due to winter in a unheated home. It seems that we've all been frustrated by dealing with a large companies and it takes 5 or 6 phone calls to resolve a problems not because customer service people are unhelpful bu because they cannot navigate the maze that is the complexities of the company. I keep hearing the phrase "Too Big To Fail", but in many ways it rather seems that they are "To Big To Succeed". When I was in college we learn't about the economies of scale, but we also learned that after a period growth when an organization becomes too big those economies diminish and become negative. From a profit perspective these companies are great, they make more money each year. I'd rather not do business with these huge companies but you often have no choice because consolidation has left so few players in a particular industry that no true free market exists. It seems to me that these companies are succeeding because there is no true free market because there are too few players in the market sector. As a customer I feel like an ant stuck on a huge super tanker in an ocean unable to turn quickly and a large storm is approaching of change. I don't know if I will make it or even the ship will through the storm.

Browsers need another language other than javascript

I've been programming for a long time. I've been programming for over 32 years. I'm saddened by the push for HTML 5. Actually its not HTML5 that upsets me it's Javascript. It's a great technology for putting simple little scripts into your browser but writing large object oriented programs it basically is horrible. It's been done just look at google maps but just look at the ugly code it took. It will push more and more programming to the cloud, which make sense for mobile platforms with the smaller cpu's but it will drive up traffic on the mobile nets. Microsoft/Google/Apple put a modern language (not basic) into a browser so we can efficiently code, sandbox it so bad scripts will not use CPU and memory.