The Board of Directors at Sprint-Nextel ousted CEO and Chairman Gary Forsee.
Sprint has been unable to take advantage of its $36 billion merger with Nextel (that ended up costing almost $50B in additional acquisitions to settle resulting litigation with Nextel Partners). Announced in Dec. 2004, only recently has the back office of the 2 separate cell companies been reconciled - sort of.
The ouster comes after the company's announcement that it won't hit its $41B revenue projection this year. (Or apparently hit any internal benchmarks for performance and integration).
How could it?
Sprint management made a decision to become an all-wireless company. Every proclamation is about that.
- Sprint is the preferred network for MVNO's.
- Pivot is the company's MVNO partnership with the major cableco's - TW, Comcast, Cox, and Bright House. (Just launching if the FCC privacy rules don't ground it).
- The launch of the femtocell service, Airave, in Sept., 2007.
- The $8B plan to build out a nationwide 4G WiMax network.
- XOHM as the brand for the new WiMax service, rolling out in 4Q07.
- The partnership with Clearwire in the WiMax effort.
- Spinning off the local/landline business (formerly Sprint United) to EMBARQ in May 2006.
- Sprint teams with Google for Gmail app and search.
Remember that Sprint is the once-upon-a-time #3 long distance company. The pin drop, all-fiber network.
What are they doing with THAT network now? Oh yeah. Nothing. Sprintlink is a decent Tier 1 internet backbone, but you wouldn't know it. The company doesn't push Long Distance, VoIP Termination, MPLS, VPN or Ethernet. Or IP for that matter. (Try getting a quote.)
After dropping the whole ION IP strategy, Sprint stopped looking at IP and started looking at wireless. Much easier to sell to mass market consumers than medium businesses. NOT.
UPDATE: " Of course when you get paid $21.6 million a year, well getting the boot comes with the gig."
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