AT&T: Unfulfilled Innovations Since 1993

Below is a montage of AT&T (T) ads circa 1993.

It isn’t clear whether AT&T actually expected to deliver these innovations. They certainly were beat to market by Cable with the cable modem, and I can’t think of a single application innovation out of the company in the last 16 years.

Keep in mind that in 1993:

1. AOL was virtually unknown
2. 14.4k modems were state of the art
3. The Web Browser had just been invented
4. Most students at universities didn’t own their own computer
5. Transmitting audio, let alone video to a consumer over the network was impossible

A remarkably accurate prediction of the future. Too bad their execution didn’t match their (or their ad agency's) vision.

And is that Tom Selleck narrating? Whoa.

Full Disclosure - I am long AT&T.

Comments

[Mark Milliman_:]

Andrew:

This is a great piece of trivia that shows the broken promises of technology from Bell Labs that AT&T's management could not capitalize. I disagree with your assumptions about the state of technology from 1993, but that is not your point. AT&T was a story of a company that could not execute itself out of a wet paper sack. This situation is why the old AT&T disintegrated into pieces. Divestiture never made sense the way it was orchestrated. The free market put it back together they way that it should have originally been executed. The "new" AT&T and Alctael-Lucent will do a much better job.

Mark

2006 Dec 10 03:07 PM