Lucent hearts series#

Later in 1996, Fiorina was appointed president of Lucent's consumer products sector, reporting to president and chief operating officer Rich McGinn. Under her guidance, the spin-off raised US$3 billion. She played a key role in planning and implementing the 1996 initial public offering of a successful stock and company launch strategy. In that capacity, she reported to Lucent chief executive Henry B. In 1995, Carly Fiorina led corporate operations. Livingston was known most for the creation of the RADIUS protocol and their PortMaster product that was used widely by dial-up internet service providers. In 1997, Lucent acquired Livingston Enterprises Inc. Lucent held discussions to acquire Juniper Networks but decided instead to build its own routers. By 1999 Lucent stock continued to soar and in that year Lucent acquired Ascend Communications, an Alameda, California–based manufacturer of communications equipment for US$24 billion. In 1997, Lucent acquired Milpitas-based voicemail market leader Octel Communications Corporation for $2.1 billion, a move which immediately rendered the Business Systems Group profitable. Its market capitalization reached a high of $258 billion, and it was at the time the most widely held company with 5.3 million shareholders. Lucent became a 'darling' stock of the investment community in the late 1990s, and its split-adjusted spinoff price of $7.56/share rose to a high of $84. Richard McGinn, who was serving as president and COO, succeeded Schacht as CEO in 1997 while Schacht remained chairman of the board. Bell Labs brought prestige to the new company, as well as the revenue from thousands of patents.Īt the time of its spinoff, Lucent was placed under the leadership of Henry Schacht, who was brought in to oversee its transition from an arm of AT&T into an independent corporation. One of the primary reasons AT&T Corporation chose to spin off its equipment manufacturing business was to permit it to profit from sales to competing telecommunications providers these customers had previously shown reluctance to purchase from a direct competitor. A telecommunication commentator referred to the logo as 'a big red zero' and predicted financial losses. Īfter the logo was compared in the media to the ring a coffee mug leaves on paper, a Dilbert comic strip showed Dogbert as an overpaid consultant designing a new company logo he takes a piece of paper that his coffee cup was sitting on and calls it the 'Brown Ring of Quality'. Carly Fiorina picked the logo because her mother was a painter and she rejected the sterile geometric logos of most high tech companies. Lucent's logo also has been said to represent constant re-creating and re-thinking. Another source says it represents the mythic ouroboros, a snake holding its tail in its mouth. One source inside Lucent says that the logo is a Zen Buddhist symbol for 'eternal truth', the Enso, turned 90 degrees and modified. The Lucent logo, the Innovation Ring, was designed by Landor Associates, a prominent San Francisco-based branding consultancy. This continues the Dante theme, although moving away from his Divine Comedy to the poem La Vita Nuova. When the rights to Inferno were sold in 2000, the company Vita Nuova Holdings was formed to represent them.

Lucent hearts series#

This extended the 'Lucifer' and Dante references as a series of punning names for the components of Inferno - Dis, Limbo, Charon and Styx (9P Protocol).

Shortly after the Lucent renaming in 1996, Lucent's Plan 9 project released a development of their work as the Inferno OS in 1997. This same linguistic root also gives Lucifer, 'the light bearer' (from lux, 'light', and ferre, 'to bear' ), who is also a character in Dante's epic poem Inferno. Corporate communications and business cards included the strapline 'Bell Labs Innovations' in a bid to retain the prestige of the internationally famous research lab, within a new business under an as-yet unknown name. The name was widely criticised, as the logo was to be, both internally and externally. The name was applied for in 1996 at the time of the split from AT&T.

Lucent advert for Inferno in IEEE Internet Computing, Volume 1, Number 2, March–April 1997