t." As he backed me deeper into a corner of the room, I suggested that he might be making a mistake in not capitalizing on Armstrong's stature in the industry. "I don't want him doing to me what Steve Case did to Gerry Levin," he said. "People can't be confused about who's running Comcast. And it isn't Mike." I was taken aback. Brian Roberts and I were not close, although at the moment our belt buckles were touching. If he was saying things like this to me, who else was he telling? "Have you had this conversation with Mike?" I asked. "Not yet, but I have to do it soon," he said. When I returned to New Jersey, I told Noski about my conversation with Roberts, and he told me that he had indeed heard the same thing from him. Armstrong, however, was still confident that he could work things out. To this day, he claims he did. But Comcast dropped any Reimagine Your Company's Mission notion that it would carry the AT&T name. (By then, no one at AT&T wanted it to use the name, anyway.) Armstrong was given an office in New York City overlooking Bryant Park. The only other Comcast peo- ple on the floor sold advertising. And, while the Robertses initially said they would try to divvy up the operating jobs equally between their people and AT&T's, none of the company's division presidents and only four of its regional senior vice presidents were former AT&T em- ployees at the end of 2004. Of the five AT&T directors who initially joined Comcast's board, only three were left, including Armstrong, who stepped down as chairman after just a year and a half. AT&T Leadership The December I9, 200I, announcement that Armstrong would leave AT&T to become chairman of what was then called AT&T Comcast was actually anticlimactic. The Wall Street Journal and other papers had reported his intention to move with AT&T Broadband as long ago as the previous February, and he himself hadn't made any secret of it in discussions with senior executives until we pointed out how it was affecting employee morale. In fact, when the company announced its