Lucent - what might have been...

The other day I read that President Bush has ok'd the proposed merger of Lucent Technologies with French telecom giant Alcatel. The new company will be led by Pat Russo, Lucent's CEO, and will be dubbed Alcatel Lucent. (Will Republicans move to ban the company's products, vis a vis Freedom Fries?) Bush had to approve the merger because of concerns about patents; Lucent's crown jewel is Bell Labs - one of the premier R&D organizations in the world. Many were concerned about the possible loss of technology and even military secrets. Evidently, there will a special panel set up to deal with any transfer of potentially sensitive secrets and technology.

I only bring this up because it brings back many memories for me. It seems like a million years ago that I began working for Lucent, in June '00. The future looked so bright, for me (in the corporate world) and also for the company. I was there exactly five weeks, and Lucent announced it would spin off its Microelectronics Group to form Agere Systems. Great, I thought - the ink isn't even dry on my Lucent business cards and now I'm working for... Well, it took a while to find out that our company would be named Agere Systems, but it might as well been named Anchor Systems, because that's exactly the direction the company went - to the bottom.

The company promptly went from about 19,000 employees to its current level of about 6,500. I was one of the employees involved in the nasty downsizing.

Anyway, just seeing the Lucent "Innovation Ring" in the news always brings back mixed emotions. I bear no ill will toward the company (after all, it helped me get my master's degree), but I still can't help think what might have been had the tech bubble not burst at the end of the 1990s.

However, in the end, I don't miss the corporate world and all the bullshit that goes with it - the politics, the backstabbing, infighting, CYA mentality, heartless and gutless layoffs, and bottom lines meaning more than employees' lives.