Don McCarty - Talk Back

The reactive "Jobs in Eight" mentality is destroying Telco after Telco. Now you are playing the numbers game addressing management goals instead of curing the root cause of the problem. How can you own a small company? Answer: Start with a big one and ignore proactive maintenance.

The demand for bandwidth has pressed us into the fiber and wireless infrastructure, but keep in mind that the copper infrastructure is financing this push to the future. The copper infrastructure and PSTN dial tone will give way to fiber and wireless, but not in my lifetime. There still is a great deal of profit in copper if it is proactively taken care of.

I wish that we could get that level of commitment from manufacturers of cable test set equipment. Instead of competing for providing a truly differentiated test set, they seem to compete for staying together as a pack offering products that aren't doing the job.

To all the great managers, I apologize, but today we're just going to have fun lamenting all the bad managers along with my dear old buddy Bob who writes about his boss, "Jack" from Mountain Bell days….