In 1980 AT&T hired McKinsey to conduct a study on the viability of the mobile phone industry. The consulting giant was much less than optimistic. It concluded that by the year 2000 there would be no more than 300,000 wireless phones. Really, where was the market for what was nosebleed expensive?
AT&T passed on the purchase of cellular properties that the world’s greatest consulting firm advised them would never be worth much. Funny about this is that the telecommunications behemoth once literally controlled 100% of the long-distance communications market. “Ma Bell” also employed 1 out of every 500 Americans. The two previous data points are a way of saying that AT&T could have easily purchased future market dominance for a small fraction of its total net worth in 1980, but then AT&T was not interested in dominating a market it expected to be small. So it once again passed.
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