TELECOM TITAN COMPANY AT&T, CEO AGE 61 ADDRESSwww.att.com BIO This was the year that AT&T became a much bigger story than 7c a minute. CEO C.
Michael Armstrong charged ahead with a strategy to own the most valuable
information pipeline into your home: your cable line. With its May deal to
acquire MediaOne, venerable Ma Bell positioned itself to become the nation's
largest cable provider. And Armstrong set himself up to control what is
potentially the best way to deliver phone calls, faxes, e-mail, news and movies
to consumers.
AT&T's push into 21st century territory is all Armstrong. The former Hughes
Electronics CEO took the helm almost two years ago, when AT&T, with little
prospect for growth, faced fierce competition in its core long-distance business.
A graduate of Ohio's Miami University, Armstrong brought expertise from various
engineering and management roles that he had filled at IBM in the 1980s. He is
widely considered, by the researchers in his labs and by Wall Street, to be one
of the few large-company executives who "get it."
BEST LINE "I'm proud to be a cable guy."
FORWARD TILT In a deal to acquire cable business Tele-Communications Inc., AT&T
inherited a 26% stake in voting shares of cable-access company Excite@Home as
well as a contract binding the company to market Excite@Home's service through
2002. This puts AT&T squarely in the middle of a legal debate over "open access"
to the cable lines. While content providers such as America Online and
Excite@Home have a big stake in how the courts rule, AT&T should come out a
winner either way, providing a vital link to the outside world no matter whose
content flows over its telephone and cable lines.
