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Bye-bye Bonfield
And so farewell Sir Peter Bonfield, CEO of BT, scourge of UK telecoms users and recipient of a particular lovely retirement watch.

By Graham Hayday

Published: Friday 02 November 2001

He announced this week that he's leaving the company in January, nearly a year before his contract expires. And why the hasty exit? Nope, it's not because the insults have finally got to him. It's because the restructuring programme he initiated is now done and dusted. Yell has been sold off, and the rest of the company split into bite-sized chunks (well, they'd be fairly big mouthfuls, but you know what we mean).

Of those chunks, mmO2 - the one with the silliest brand name since Utterly Butterly - will be the first to flee the coup and hit the stock markets. The future of the other bits is less certain, but the structures are in place to ensure BT is a tad more flexible and responsive than it used to be. Not that that's saying a whole lot... Oh, and while we're tallying the 'success' column, we all love 1471, don't we?

Bonfield's work is done, so it's time for the sheriff to leave town. At least this is the official line. But his departure is more likely to be marked by a lonely tumbleweed tossing idly in the wind than three cheers from all the good folk of telecoms town.

In his six years at the helm, BT's share price has plunged from £15 to £4. The company's ambitions to be a serious global player have floundered on the rocks of its enormous debt. Concert, the joint venture with AT&T, has gone the way of all flesh (at some considerable cost - over £1bn to be precise, not to mention the losses it made along the way).

BT bungled the MCI takeover. It's pulled out of Japan Telecom and Spain's Airtel. And all because it had to do something about a teeny tiny £30bn debt.

And then there's broadband of course. BT makes bold claims these days that it's done nothing wrong, that the lack of broadband uptake is due to a lack of demand.

Bald claims more like. BT owns 35 million telephone lines. Only 150 of them have now been unbundled. BT has 5,500 exchanges. The number ready for use by other operators scrapes into double figures. Just.

True, DSL is available in 1,000 exchanges direct from BT or from a handful of resellers. BT claimed just this week that 70 per cent of the population can - in theory - get ADSL (see http://www.silicon.com/a48668 ). But as Nigel Pitcher, the marketing director of Fibernet (one company still involved in the unbundling process) told the Telegraph this week: "It has taken two and a half years to reach this point. You could say it's a national disgrace."

You could say it's taken longer than that. BT began working on ADSL at least five years ago, with the first trials happening in West London not long after. And yet there are still large parts of the nation's capital which have no high speed net access whatsoever, let alone the more remote regions of the country. And even those who do have DSL think around £40 a month is too much to pay.

And so thoughts turn to a fitting epitaph for Bonfield. 'Could have done better' is one phrase which springs to mind. Given that he's walking away with a £1.5m pay off (told you his retirement watch was nice), you could argue that 'Could have done much, much better' is more appropriate.

Any better ideas? Then log on to http://www.silicon.com/a48726 and post a reader comment. But avoid swearwords and libelous insults please.

If thinking about that makes you cross, you may well be on the verge of exploding with rage by now. Simply turning on a computer makes us angry these days: an NOP poll this week found that nearly two thirds of UK computer users believe their PCs are making their lives more stressful. Particular bugbears are slow websites and crashing operating systems (a thing of the past now that we have XP. Right?)

The research revealed that there's a division of the sexes here: nearly twice as many men as women suffer from moments of computer angst. Is this because we clever men demand more from our PCs than women and consequently come up against their limitations more often? Or is it because women are now resigned to the deficiencies of anything built by men? After all, there weren't too many members of the fairer sex in the garage with Wozniak and Jobs; there weren't too many women in Big Blue's labs or Bill Gates' bedroom. As it were. Got any thoughts on this? Then drop us a mail at editorial@silicon.com .

The time: Thursday 25 October, 2001. The place: silicon.com. The story: "11 September to blame, says Micromuse& Network management software specialist Micromuse reported poor earnings in its fourth quarter results and has warned the current quarter could be worse. The company cited the terrorist attack on 11 September for a reduction in profits." (http://www.silicon.com/a48566 )

The time: Monday 29 October, 2001. The place: silicon.com. The story: "Don't blame 11 September, says Gartner... The terrorist attacks of 11 September had little to do with changes in IT budgets and is merely being used as an excuse for weak quarterly figures and redundancies, according to analyst house Gartner." (http://www.silicon.com/a48669 )

Who do you believe? Tricky one that...