are, developed at Bell Labs, as a wedge into the computer business, and when that failed, it bought the NCR Corporation in I99I. For its part, IBM had acquired the Rolm Corporation, a maker of office telephone systems, and established a Tough Calls satellite communications business that it later exchanged for an inter- est in MCI Corporation. IBM was quicker to realize that the machinery of the digital age was less important than its application. It unloaded Rolm and not only divested its interest in MCI but sold its global data network (in one further irony, to Armstrong's AT&T) SO that it could concentrate on business applications and services. AT&T didn't finally throw in the towel on the computer business until 1996. When Armstrong arrived in 1997, AT&T's remaining long-distance businesses were declining, and the company did not have a workable strategy to extricate itself from fifteen years of blind alleys and ever- deepening ruts. The company had spent billions trying to break into local markets by reselling the Bells' service and had nothing but losses to show for it. Its global strategy was a patchwork of loose alliances and inconsistent services. After a fast start, its Internet service was an underfunded also-ran. Its corporate services were largely analog in a world that was going digital. When Armstrong broke his silence on January 26, 1998, it should not have been to announce a solution to these problems, or even a partial solution or anything that sounded like a solution. It should have been to begin describing the problem. One of the lessons I learned in AT&T's October 2000 restructuring announcement is the futility of trying to sell a solution to people who don't really understand the problem. To a lesser but still significant degree, that was also our situation in early 1998. Few people really appreciated AT&T's underlying problem. The issues that were making the papers-bungled succession, in- effective marketing, bloated costs, high prices, and a slow-moving cul- ture-were important but secondar