justen

The gist: Well, I told you so. That was in December 2004. By June of 2005, I had moved Nextel to my “endangered companies” list. And, here we are today. The Wall Street Journal says the Sprint board has begun quietly searching for a new chief executive, and they hope to have somebody by December.

Side note:: It took three years for Sprint’s board to see my side of things. Good God, that means George Halvorson might survive until November 2009!

The whole story: I figured I could make this an easy post and just quote my previous thoughts on the matter. But I’ll try to freshen things up a bit, still. So, here were my thoughts then, along with my commentary now…

Combining Sprint’s CDMA network with Nextel’s Motorola iDEN platform would be a difficult challenge, to say the least.

Well, I said it would be a difficult challenge. It turns out it was nearly impossible, and instead of figuring out an eloquent way about it, Sprint essentially started paying Motorola to duct tape a CDMA phone to a Nextel walkie-talkie, and called it a day. Lot of good that did…

Which leads me to… So one has a consumer-heavy base, while the other has a strong business customer portfolio? Match made in Heaven, right? Not quite.

Yeah, about that… Well, business customers have been flocking away from Sprint faster than you can say lickety-split. Why did Sprint buy Nextel again?

First: Nextel agreed to move all of its customers to a new, higher frequency… Then: And, Nextel needs to get a high-speed platform in place.

My, how time flies. Now, Sprint needs to get a new high-speed platform in place, and they want to use all that yummy, higher frequency spectrum Nextel got way back when…

So, back to today… Gary Forsee? Well, it was a tough job, and he really didn’t do his job. Besides, he’s a quadruple-trillionaire by this point, so I’m sure he can live out his retirement days replaying the merger over and over in his head.

Ralph Whitworth, though? Dangerous. He (and a lot of other people) want Sprint to scrap WiMax and stop spending money. Well, if you thought the Sprint and Nextel merger was a bad idea, eliminating Sprint’s capital spending to rollout WiMax would just about move Sprint from the intensive care unit to the mortuary.

Gary Forsee’s one saving grace is that he figured out WiMax is where Sprint needs to be. Ignoring the business today in the hopes of a better tomorrow probably wasn’t the best idea. But, hey, you’ve gotta’ work with what you’ve got.

Sprint just needs to buy Clearwire, and Craig McCaw needs to become Sprint’s next chief executive. And Sprint’s shareholders need to push harder to get WiMax rolled out faster, not slower. Fully capitulating to Whitworth and giving up on WiMax would be forsaking long-term profit for a short-term bump in the share price. Sprint’s WiMax plans are a significant strategic advantage over Verizon and AT&T. Good God, Sprint’s board, if you’ve ever listened to any sense, don’t can WiMax!

Oh, and keep the fiber and long distance, too. I promise, it makes sense, even if you don’t understand all this tech-no-logical mumbo jumbo right now.