Posted in Default
Well, the day has finally arrived. Other than being asked to comment by the local news crew outside the building, it was fairly uneventful. As Melanie just said, I should probably put something on my resume about working for companies that get bought out. If you’re looking to sell, hire me! I suppose only 50% of the companies I’ve worked for have been bought (if you include the company I owned and operated), so it’s no guarantee, but those are pretty good odds.
Things look pretty good for my job. My boss’s boss is the only executive from AT&T Wireless who’s directly reporting to Cingular’s President/CEO, Stan Sigman. That looks pretty good for our jobs, although there’s still the possibility they could decide that International has to use all of domestic’s IT systems and phase our jobs out, but something tells me that’s unlikely. Our technical systems aren’t incredibly complex, but our legal arrangements are, and something tells me that we’ll probably be left fairly alone for the time being, especially with all Cingular has to worry about and considering how small our division actually is.
However, I’ve been seriously thinking about trying to get a job at ClearWire, which is Craig McCaw’s new venture in Kirkland which is venturing into the area of WiMax deployment. WiMax is a new technology, the 802.16e standard, which will allow broadband fixed wireless deployments (and sub 2ghz mobile deployments). It has a theoretical bandwidth potential of over 200 megabits a second, which would allow for Video on Demand, VoIP and Internet services all to flow over the same pipe, wirelessly, into your house. Obviously, this bodes incredibly well in rural areas where fiber to the premesis isn’t likely to come along for quite some time (and with this kind of technology, probably ever). It’s an excellent last mile alternative, and with McCaw’s history and connections, it’s probably likely to go very big.
In the mean time though, things look good for me at AWS. I have work to keep me busy for the next year if nothing changes, and I’ve got a good position there. With the announcement of where our organization is reporting, we’ll have our own representation in Cingular’s strategic leadership, so that bodes well for our jobs to remain in Redmond for the forseeable future. Who knows what’s going to happen, but seeing as no other senior AT&T executives are remaining, I think things are looking pretty good for me. I hate orange though, I wonder if that’ll cause a problem…
