How Comcast lost friends, its influence, and the bid for Time Warner Cable

[Commentary] “We’re moving on” is a phrase that Comcast CEO Brian Roberts has been saying a lot lately. He said it the day before, when Comcast announced its blowout first-quarter earnings (a 10 percent rise, to $2.06 billion), and he said it on April 24, when the company walked away from its failed $45 billion bid for Time Warner Cable. It’s no wonder why. The experience was a traumatic one for the company -- or should have been. It wasn’t just that the merger fizzled. Lots of proposed unions don’t end up being consummated. It was how it failed.

The deal’s demise and the years leading up to it present a case study in corporate solipsism. Comcast, say many, has long acted like the company that never needed anybody -- seeming to alienate networks on its cable system, Silicon Valley partners, and countless numbers of its own customers -- to the point where it found itself with few allies when the merger was being reviewed. The Philadelphia (PA) company, indeed, might offer a rare lesson in whether having a reputation for good corporate community-ship actually matters in today’s hypercompetitive world. The company says it got serious about fixing its customer-service image before it ever thought of merging with TWC. Asked whether his customers’ criticisms had anything to do with the merger’s failure, Roberts had this to say at a press event during the big Chicago cable expo: “You would have to ask the decision-makers, but I think irrespective we have been on this journey for a while. Probably my own view, deep down, it didn’t. It wasn’t determinative.” We’ll never know that for sure, of course. But if the company’s mean-girl rep wasn’t “determinative” in thwarting the merger, it has clearly become the target of Comcast’s top brass today -- and this strategic refocusing for the cable company may ultimately be more essential to its long-term success than a marriage with TWC ever would have been. What may be the biggest irony in this case study in corporate relations is that Comcast’s legions of adversaries may have made the company that much stronger. The boys at Harvard will be studying this one for years.