Building the Bell System
AT&T wasn’t competent at product development. Yes, the company was the proud owner of Bell Labs; the inventor of the transistor, the C programming language, and Unix; and was a marvelous place that probed deeply into the fundamentals of nature. But there was no competence within AT&T at making working consumer products.
Richard Rumelt • Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters
telecom is the nation’s most heavily taxed and regulated industry, and it is capital-intensive and changing more rapidly than any other industry.