Rise And Fall Of Covad
from the what-went-wrong? dept
Another one of these stories about the rise and fall of some big name tech company. In this case, the story is about Covad which seemed to base an awful lot of their business strategy on the idea that the phone companies (who they needed to partner with) were too stupid to realize the DSL opportunity themselves. I think any business model that relies on the idea “those other guys just don’t get it” as a competitive advantage is likely to face some trouble at some point. There’s also an amusing story about how Robert Knowling, the former CEO of Covad, tried to get Covad DSL at his new house. But, after he got frustrated trying to deal with the installation delay, he just went with a cable modem.
