Lucent Technologies

» see lucent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The logo was a red circle drawn by hand, left open at the top, and it went on everything the company touched. Landor Associates designed it and coined the name to go with it, a Latin-flavored invention meaning something close to shining, chosen because a company about to inherit Bell Labs needed a word that was not AT&T. It got compared to a coffee stain almost immediately and never really shook that off.

AT&T broke itself into three parts in 1996 and Lucent was the equipment piece. It took the factories that had been Western Electric and the research arm that was Bell Labs, and its business was selling switches and optical gear to the telephone companies that were about to spend a decade laying fiber. The stock came out in April 1996 and raised roughly three billion dollars, the largest American offering to that point, and the separation finished on 30 September.

Then the boom arrived. At the top the shares touched eighty-four dollars and the company was worth somewhere around two hundred and fifty-eight billion. About a hundred and sixty-five thousand people worked there. It was the most widely held stock in the United States, sitting in retirement accounts belonging to people who could not have described a single product it made.

I have never worked inside a telephone company and never bought anything Lucent sold. The name I actually knew was the one it had inherited. If you study computer engineering you meet Bell Labs constantly and never as a vendor: it is in the citation on the transistor and in the history of C and Unix. Lucent was the corporate wrapper around all of that for ten years, and the wrapper is the part almost nobody outside the industry could have named at the time.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the quarter that broke it ~

On 6 January 2000 the chief executive told the market that Lucent had missed its quarter, citing disruption in the optical networking business. The shares fell twenty-eight percent in a single day and about sixty-four billion dollars of value went with them. That was the announcement. The explanation took two more years to come out.

What had been holding the numbers up was partly the practice of lending customers the money to buy the equipment, and partly revenue recognized before it should have been. In November 2000 the company disclosed a one hundred and twenty-five million dollar accounting error. In December it admitted that revenue for the most recent quarter had been overstated by close to seven hundred million. By October 2002 the stock was fifty-five cents, and the SEC settlement over the whole affair came in 2004.

~ the pieces that were sold off ~

The response to the collapse was to take the company apart from the inside. The enterprise business went out as Avaya in October 2000, which is why the phone on an American office desk carried a different name from the switch in the basement. The microelectronics business went out as Agere Systems in June 2002, taking the chip work with it.

Headcount fell from about one hundred and sixty-five thousand to roughly thirty thousand five hundred. Whole factory towns in New Jersey and Pennsylvania went with it, and so did most of the industrial research capacity that had made the name worth having in the first place. What remained by 2005 was a company selling into carriers who had stopped buying, in a market where Nortel was in the same condition and a Chinese entrant nobody had priced in was taking the contracts.

~ what happened to bell labs ~

Alcatel and Lucent announced their merger on 2 April 2006 and closed it on 1 December, which made Lucent a wholly owned subsidiary of a French company and put the two names on one letterhead. The combined entity was itself bought by Nokia in 2016, so the research institution that produced the transistor is now a Finnish asset called Nokia Bell Labs.

lucent.com still resolves. It has not been a company since the end of 2006, and the address answers from a block of the internet that AT&T handed to Lucent in 1996 and that has changed owners twice since without changing numbers. Everything about the ending is like that: nothing was destroyed exactly, it just kept being handed further away from where it started until the name was the only part left, and then the name went too.

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