NAME THE FUTURE

Since SBC officially changed its name to AT&T and unveiled its new logo to the media, the blogosphere and industry message boards have predictably gone crazy, exploring every last possible implication of the name change. The new AT&T is obviously playing up tradition: It's taking the most storied name in telecom to signal the rebirth of the great telecom provider. Others are looking for more sinister ends, spelling out the collapse of all telecom regulation since 1980 — the return of Ma Bell and its old monopolistic stranglehold.

The speculation doesn't just stop at SBC's rebranding. A swathe of reports erupted last week, claiming the new AT&T would reclaim the former AT&T's wireless glory, forcing its new — or rather old — moniker on Cingular Wireless by right of its majority ownership stake, regardless of how minority stakeholder BellSouth felt about it. The industry seems to be going a bit AT&T mad, assigning the name to whatever it possibly can. I wouldn't be surprised if the new Verizon Communications/MCI tries to adopt the AT&T name if their merger passes muster.

The fact is that the name AT&T seems to be accruing far more meaning and far more significance than the company — either pre-SBC merger or today — could ever possibly live up to. I wouldn't call the AT&T brand an empty shell by any means. It still carries enormous clout in the enterprise world and the global telecom community. And its history, American Telephone & Telegraph, is unsurpassed. But for the average consumer or small business user — who comprise the majority of the former SBC's customers — that history and reputation probably means little.

What clout the AT&T name did have among those customers has been minimized over the past few years. SBC's daughter company Cingular has done everything it can to stamp out the AT&T Wireless name in the year since they merged, and even before the buy out, AT&T Wireless was shedding customers. AT&T itself shifted its focus from the consumer to business years ago, withdrawing from the advertising and marketing barrage that fuels America's collective memory.

What's more, much of the glory the new AT&T has attached to its name is merely a ghost of the past. Gone are the days when AT&T was one of the world's foremost innovators with the invention of such scientific miracles as the transistor and the laser to its credit. Those innovations came from Bell Labs, which left AT&T when Lucent Technologies was spun off last decade. AT&T's former scientific might and industry scope are shadows of what they were before 1984. To try to conjure them back for the sake of a new brand seems to me wishful thinking.

We're Americans. We forget very quickly. Verizon and Cingular have built powerful brands in a space of a few years that have obliterated their original parent names. People seem to very quickly forgetting that MCI was once the much-vilified WorldCom. Although the name AT&T probably never left the lexicon of brand names that inhabit our popular memory, it's a name that a lot of people are probably ready to forget.