This week, BuzzFeed announced that it was acquiring HuffPost (acquired by Verizon in 2015 as part of the $4.4 billion AOL acquisition) in a complex deal with Verizon Media. Meanwhile, AT&T is still looking for a buyer for DirecTV (which they acquired in 2015 for $49 billion). Also announced this week, T-Mobile is shutting down their TVision Home service that they aquired in 2017 (while confusingly launching a similar service also called TVision). These transactions are just the latest in a long line of symptoms of a consistent problem. While mobile operators are great at operating wireless networks, they fail their stakeholders when they stray beyond their strategic boundaries.
Verizon and AT&T have reached their similar situations by moving in opposite directions. Verizon seemed to start without a strategy, so they made some big mistakes, and now that they have a strategy they need to unwind those mistakes. AT&T had a strategy, but they ignored it and made some big mistakes. They now don’t seem to know what their strategy is, but still need to unwind those mistakes so their debt doesn’t kill them. Meanwhile, T-Mobile was a scrappy, under-resourced upstart that executed against a focused strategy.