Putting aside the dubious wisdom of SBC acquiring AT&T, the reported price tag is unbelievably low. $15 billion? AT&T Wireless was bought out for $41 billion. It's just an incredible testament not only to the dwindling value of residential long distance telephone service, but also to AT&T's colossal failure to articulate any value in what is actually a pretty good data network.

Put another way, a 100 year-old company with 50 million customers is fetching 1/3 as much as a two year-old company wrangled by an information management disaster, repeated service glitches and a flood of flocking customers. Incredible!