which accused AT&T of everything from driving AtHome into Tough Calls bankruptcy to stealing the design of its network. In hindsight, these stories would have had less credibility if we had been as open about our efforts to resuscitate the AtHome network as we later were about our efforts to recreate it. Similarly, AT&T's fortunes took such a sudden turn for the worse in mid-2000 that some people wondered whether the company had been sitting on bad news hoping that some earnings alchemist would wander into its midst. Both suspicions were baseless. While neither event was the product of a conspiracy, they both demonstrated how efficiently natural forces fill a news vacuum if you allow one to de- velop. May 2, 2000, Revision of Earnings Guidance On May 2, 2000, AT&T projected that its operating earnings would be 5 percent lower than the estimates that had been announced just five months before. The company's stock declined I5 percent in a sin- gle day as investors reacted to what they believed were inflated expecta- tions. Those expectations had been set in a full-day extravaganza for ana- lysts and media in a glittery ballroom at New York's Waldorf-Astoria the previous December. The presentations were choreographed to demonstrate that the company was taking aggressive action to partici- pate in the industry's growth. With his typical penchant for "making news," Armstrong announced plans for the creation of a tracking stock for the company's wireless business, new leadership for its busi- ness services division, a major expansion of its fiber-optic network, and another near-doubling of its revenue growth rate. Operational earnings were projected to be between $2.10 and $2.15 per share. The only hitch in his plan was a delay in naming a new chief fi- nancial officer to replace Dan Somers, whose appointment as presi- dent of the company's cable business was made permanent. Actually, when I arrived at the Waldorf the evening before, I was carrying two versions of the main news release. In one, we would announce the ap