Ten Brands That Will Disappear in 2011 | Hacker News Reader

Ten Brands That Will Disappear in 2011

247wallst.com

8 pointsobsaysditto13 comments

On T-Mobile: A merger with Sprint-Nextel has been mentioned several times. The combined company would have a customer base about the same size as AT&T or Verizon

After the difficulties of merging with Nextel (competing corporate cultures and different networks), I doubt Sprint would be eager to see history repeat itself. To have to run possibly 5 different networks (CDMA, GSM, iDEN, 4G/WiMAX, LTE) would be too much to handle.

T-mobile is supposedly merging with Orange in the UK.

I'm pretty sure Sprint knew what they were doing when they bought Nextel. At the time:

1) Push-to-talk was iDEN only

2) Nextel was charging $70+/month before that was a normal price for service

3) The US govt was (and still is?) a large customer

I still think you're right though; I don't see them adding a third line of phones anytime soon.

Sprint thought they knew what they were doing. On paper it sounded like a match made in heaven. They would scoop up Nextel's cash cow subscribers, and migrate them to CDMA. They made a big mistake when they migrated Boost mobile prepaid customers to iDEN shortly after the merger, maxing out the capacity of the existing Nextel towers and alienating Nextel subscribers. They ended up having to invest in additional 1800 iDEN towers nationwide to keep up, but they still ended up losing millions of subscribers. I believe a lot of those fleet contracts switched to Verizon, but the feds still use Nextel.

http://news.cnet.com/Broken-connection-for-Sprint-Nextel/210...

Of course, you're totally right. It was a decent deal on paper but they totally failed on planning/execution.

I miss PTT. I wish Android/iOS devices supported it directly.

Check out the Motorola i1. An iDEN Android phone... which seemingly will ship with v1.5. Ouch.

BTW, have ever worked for Motorola/Nextel? :)

An iDEN Android phone

I never thought I would see an Android iDEN phone!

I've never worked for Motorola or Nextel, but I have been a loyal Sprint customer for over 10 years.

Agreed, totally asinine. Carriers tend to acquire each other along protocol boundaries. Verizon acquired Alltel, which was a predominantly CDMA2000 company. In addition, T-Mobile's network is predominantly urban, which is already well-covered by the existing larger carriers. They generally acquire carriers that are in areas for which they don't have coverage. Further:

* T-Mobile has been adding customers while Sprint has been losing them year over year. Just check their investor relations sites, it's in their quarterly report.

* T-Mobile has won ALL of the J.D. Power & Associates customer service awards for 5 years running.

* T-Mobile is the only nationwide carrier offering unsubsidized post-paid phone plans in the US. This can save up to $50/mo off of AT&T or Verizon.

* T-Mobile's data networks are not congested like AT&T's are. In addition, T-Mobile was the first US carrier to add HSPA+, which can achieve speeds that are at par with WiMAX in real world conditions.

* T-Mobile has never competed against the big three on coverage or phones. They compete on customer service and value.

I came here to say something similar. T-Mobile not only competes on customer service they destroy their competition in this area. (Value, too, with the unsubsidized plans.)

I have been with T-Mobile for about a year now after going through the pain of dealing with both Sprint and AT&T, I will not go back.

Interesting that Radio Shack is only changing their name and image now. They objected to Auto Shack's name in the late 80s forcing them to become AutoZone which really took off after the rebranding. It seems like they would have seen how well AutoZone did with a modern sounding name and done the same before now.

I don't think a modern sounding name would help revive Radio Shack. AutoZone would do fine with many names, because they carry products people want to buy. I can't think of anything I'd want to buy from Radio Shack, now that they don't carry electronic components any more.

Some of these arguments are very weak, especially for Kia which amounted to "Well, Ford and GM couldn't handle a dozen brands each so obviously Hyundai can't handle two." Couldn't the author give at least sales figures?

Moody's is not going anywhere. Many regulations and investment charters require an NRSRO opinion. Inclusion of MCO got me to stop reading the article.

List post, plus paginated to up the number of page views on site while lowering usability. Basically, I love this site. And this post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com