Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Grande President and CEO Step Down

Today's Statesman reports that Grande Communications president Joe Ross is stepping down. Ross plans to stay on as an adviser until a successor is found. The news comes just six days after Grande CEO Bill Morrow stepped down.

Interim CEO W.K.L. "Scott" Ferguson says the resignations don't indicate problems with the company. With Grande's initial network build-out well underway, Ferguson says "It's more of a marketing game and more of an operational game now."

I don't have the knowledge to comment any further on these developments, other than to say a brand new high-speed network doesn't count for much if you can't even squeeze clear local signals from it.

As a local (San Marcos) company, Grande can really capitalize on residual animus toward Time Warner, particularly in a city like Austin where a lot of people are predisposed against multinational corporations as a matter of principle. It would be a real shame if that opportunity was wasted on something as basic as making sure Fox 7's Simpsons reruns don't cut out.

2 comments:

chepo said...

I loved the price of Grande but their customer service sucks donkey balls. It took them 6 months to send me a refund check when I overpaid my bill. So I hate them now. Plus Time Warners internet service is way better.

Anonymous said...

I don't know, man. Road Runner's awfully slow for me, but then again, I'm still running my desktop PC on 64K of RAM. The wireless hook-up runs much faster.