Has there literally ever been a case where a merger actually improved things for customers to the extent suggested by the merging companies? I certainly can't think of one.
In the case of hospitals, a system occasionally takes over a bankrupt hospital. That isn't particularly worse for the people that continue to have proximity to the services available at the hospital.
Also modern Apple devices are based on the NeXT's operating system and have nothing other than cosmetic and emulative compatibility with MacOS. OSX/macOS is NeXTStep on top of Mach.
source: bought $100,000 of APPL in 1997.
Not really to "bring back Jobs". Jobs was not considered any kind of wonder CEO or miracle worker at the time. They wanted a new OS, as their own traditional Mac OS successor attempt had failed.
They also looked and negotiated with Be (for BeOS), so it wasn't that they wanted Jobs particularly.
It would just be a nice "back to roots" publicity side benefit, but nobody considered Jobs especially their potential saviour at the time...
While there were more companies before the merger, verizon and at&t were dominating that a long tail of small companies was not true competition.
When tmobile merged, it started to add a true 3rd competitor to the scene and they were the first to do a lot of stuff with unlimited data. Many people attribute verizon and at&t following suit to their initial move.
Of course this is speculation as no one can prove casual linkage between these events, but it seems pretty plausible.
Sure, Sprint is a dead carrier waking, but T-Mobile is already a competitor to Verizon and AT&T.
T-Mobile doesn’t need Sprint to compete with the other two at this point. They have the spectrum. They also have a 5G network rollout out with the lowest frequencies, which means they’ll actually have a coverage advantage.
Back to Sprint, they essentially can’t afford to build out 5G. But for consumers, they’re the cheapest option by far, especially when you consider their MVNOs like Boost Mobile. They also have a tremendous mess of spectrum that isn’t a very good situation for device interoperability and availability, nor is it good for rolling out 5G at all.
In other words, Sprint needs T-Mobile, but T-Mobile doesn’t need Sprint.
If Sprint cut costs and declared that they are the cheap, forever on 4G network, that would benefit price-sensitive consumers. Sprint’s competitive advantage would be that it doesn’t have to spend a lot of money on bothering to upgrade anything, or the marketing budgets that Verizon and the rest spend (I’d love to know how much of our monthly bill ends up on TV), and that their 4G network is good enough if you mostly care about price.
In my view this is the alternative that the corporations won’t even suggest to the public because it’s not as profitable. The people who own Sprint maximize their investment returns by selling to T-Mobile.
Sprint going bankrupt or being sold in pieces or in whole may even benefit the consumer more than Sprint being absorbed by T-Mobile, but the big three are never going to admit that.
Finally, what’s happening here is that you are unintentionally parroting T-Mobile’s own PR and lobbying efforts. T-Mobile put out news stories and press releases describing this exact scenario and how it benefits the consumer. They claim that they will truly do 5G right if they own Sprint, but I think they just want Sprint’s customers to be tacked on to their own.
How come T-Mobile is consistently cheaper than ATT and Verizon? How come Verizon is the most expensive?
If the networks were the same, why would people opt to pay Verizon more? As far as I know, for coverage, Verizon > ATT > T-Mobile. It’s mostly a function of more towers, and I presume T-Mobile has the fewest.
There’s even a joke of “how to go from billionaire to millionaire? Buy an airline”.
- Richard Branson
Well done.