MCI Accepts Worldcom's Bid? ; charset=us-ascii

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1

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.

2

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

3

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

4

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