The decline and fall of AT&T: a personal recollection.(The Enduring Lessons of the Breakup of AT&T: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospec

So this was AT&T--a gigantic, bureaucratized company, with a million employees during the 1970s--and I said to Brown that I did not think the culture of the company would adapt to the computer industry, because in that industry, even more than in business telephone services, it's not enough to have the very best equipment. The really important thing is to be able to integrate the equipment with the customer's business. Can you explain it to them? Can you make it usable for them, even if their needs are idiosyncratic? That didn't sound like AT&T.

I obviously didn't make any impression on Brown. But whether he really thought that AT&T had a future in the computer industry or whether he just thought he was going to lose the case because of Judge Greene's hostility, because of Bill Baxter's extreme hostility, because AT&T had spent ten years trying to get legislation in Congress to preserve its monopoly and had failed, I don't know. Anyway, that ended my involvement with AT&T. It was lucrative, it was fun, I learned a lot. What I learned is irrelevant to 2008, but I can't help that.

Hon. Richard A. Posner, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; Senior Lecturer, University of Chicago Law School. This is the slightly revised draft of a luncheon talk given on April 18, 2008, at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania Law School on "The Enduring Lessons of the Breakup of AT&T: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective."

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