 Carlton Hotel the evening before the company's 2000 annual meeting, some of the directors seemed surprised that Armstrong was willing to walk away from a business that had such a golden franchise. Almost every survey picked AT&T as the leading consumer communi- cations brand. Nearly half of consumers said that they would prefer receiving local service from AT&T than from their existing provider. (A significant percentage thought that AT&T already provided their local service.) The business had over 50 million customers, many of whom still hung up on competitors' telemarketing calls. Say Good-Bye to the Rah-Rah Brother- and Sisterhood The directors asked the Pegasus Team to consider other business combinations that could leverage the AT&T brand. Armstrong prom- ised to put the best minds on it and hired investment bankers to help value the business should the board decide to spin it off, sell it, or merge it with another company. Armstrong had difficulty thinking of the consumer business as anything but a millstone around his neck. Before the end of the month, he traveled to Boston for a meeting with Frank Governali, the powerful Goldman Sachs telecom analyst. The note that Governali issued after the meeting signaled just how deter- mined Armstrong was to rid himself of a business that colored every- thing else he was trying to accomplish: "[Armstrong] recognizes the problems, is not wedded to historical decisions (or businesses), is im- patient, and is willing to take dramatic steps, no matter how un- conventional they may seem. This applies to the consumer long distance business in particular." When plans to separate the consumer long-distance business from AT&T leaked in the summer and fall of 2000, the reaction ranged from disbelief to horror. The Industry Standard, a magazine spawned in the orgiastic frenzy of the Internet craze and free of emotional at- tachments to anything more than a year old, surprisingly wrote, "It's hard to imagine AT&T getting out of the phone business." Perhaps less unexpectedly, th