October 8th, 2007
Foreseen: Forsee out at Sprint. But will they learn from these mistakes under his watch?
As I posted last week- and with plenty of reasons offered- SprintNextel’s feckless CEO Gary Forsee- was finally encountering some real thin ice.
Only it didn’t take that long before he slipped through said ice.
He’s out as of today.
Why?
I know I am sounding like a broken record, but too many customer defections (including mine BTW) happened under his watch. The cell service was inconsistent. Both marketing and technology-wise, the absorption of Nextel, which was purchased by Sprint two years ago, proceeded at a glacial pace.
Loyal, paying customers were booted for roaming too much and/or asking too many questions of customer and tech “support.” Rather than buying a VoIP company such as SunRocket with (200,000 built-in accounts) or Vonage with their 2.3 million ready-to-be-added-to-the-balance sheet force multiplier, Sprint twiddled their thumbs and got dreamy-eyed about building out a WiMAX network with Clearwire sometime around 2013.
The question now is has SprintNextel learned from the mistakes of the CEO they were separated from today?
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
