s Taking It to the Street By the end of January 1998, Armstrong was ready to host a meeting with financial analysts to outline the rest of his plan. To set the stage, we gave an exclusive interview to Business Week that was timed to ap- pear just before our January 26 analyst meeting. The headline of the story, which appeared on the cover and also included a one-page "chat" with Armstrong, was "New Boss, New Plan" and it outlined the general themes that Armstrong would address at the analyst meet- ing in six categories: costs, local service, long distance, international, wireless, and the Internet. It featured a big picture of Zeglis saying "Everything we do takes about a third of the time it used to take." And the seven-page story ended with the magazine's own assessment- "[Armstrong's] off to a good start." On January 26, AT&T announced a better than expected increase in fourth quarter earnings, plans to reduce expenses by $1.6 billion in the current year alone, and major changes to the AT&T network that would vastly increase its data-handling capacity at a sharply lower cost. Analysts termed the meeting, held in the cavernous ballroom of the New York Hilton, more upbeat than the previous year's, yet the stock declined about $4 a share over the course of the day, largely because of a report by Jack Grubman that the company was thinking about buying a cable company. When Armstrong stepped off the esca- lator at the New York Hilton on his way into the ballroom, he ran into Grubman. "Why did you put out that crazy note," he asked, semi-playfully. "Because you're planning a crazy move," Grubman replied dead seriously. Luckily, the flow of analysts off the escalator pushed the two men in different directions. Cable was just one of the technologies men- tioned in the formal presentations during the meeting-and in the question period that followed, Armstrong went out of his way to say he was thinking of partnerships, not acquisitions. Nevertheless, the stock price did not return to pre-meeting levels until mid-March, 