better Kodak reorganization

In article , says...

PeterN wrote:
On 5/9/2013 12:48 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
So you're saying that the MCI lawsuit that resulted in the breakup of
AT&T into 7 different companies and forced the divestiture of Western
Electric and Bell Labs was not the major factor in the decline of AT&T?


See my prior post. It was not. The problem is when you
put money into research and development, it adversely
impacts the bottom line, for accounting purposes. Lower
bottom line = lower bonuses for management.

Neither of those descriptions relate to the history of AT&T.

Think "Information Age". In 1940 it was a company based
on the economics of message traffic. By 1960 there were
predictions on when revenue from message traffic would
drop below revenue from byte oriented data traffic.

Corporate AT&T was frozen and unable to respond to the
changes that occured as those predictions became true.

Literally within months of the day the data traffic
revenues rose above message traffic revenues the AT&T
Board of Directors threw in the towel, disolved the
company as it existed, sold off the parts, and went
home.

Now that is a fine piece of revisionism.

In article ,
says...

On 05/09/2013 01:02 PM, J. Clarke wrote:
In article ,
says...

On 05/09/2013 12:48 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
In article ,
says...

On 05/08/2013 04:49 PM, J. Clarke wrote:
In article 79bf218c-4aab-4dce-8f0c-
, says...

On May 7, 12:48 pm, Bowser wrote:
On Mon, 6 May 2013 19:13:46 +0200, Alfred Molon

wrote:
In article , Bowser says...
Keep one thing in mind: Kodak's past management wasn't very bright.
These are they guys who once tasked their people with finding a way to
kill the digital revolution to protect their film business.

... really they did? Almost too funny to be true. What plan did Kodak
devise to kill digital photography?

OK, not a CEO, but a product manager:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/es...k_eulogy.shtml

Still, what a moron...

There are numerous examples of large companies being wholly and
illogically resistant to change. Sony, GM, Bell, the list of
casualties and soon-to-be casualties goes on.

Bell was not done in by "change", it was done in by lawyers.


In my opinion as a former employee of a Bell System subsidiary, the
company was not done in by change, and lawyers may have helped do it in,
but were not the primary cause.

My perception is that the old timers from the time of Theodore Vail
onward, who understood the business, had all died or retired, or were
forced out by their age. They were replaced by business administration
types whose principle achievements in college was their abilities on the
football teams of second string leagues. They were all cheering, slogans
(Ready, Fire, Aim was a pet peeve of mine) and win the next quarter.
They did not understand the business, they had no vision beyond the next
quarterly report. They wanted to boost the value of their stock options
and they did not care what happened to the company afterwards. Après
moi, le déluge. And that is what they got. It was so sad to see this
over 100 year old institution destroyed by the rot from within. A tragedy.

So you're saying that the MCI lawsuit that resulted in the breakup of
AT&T into 7 different companies and forced the divestiture of Western
Electric and Bell Labs was not the major factor in the decline of AT&T?




I am not saying that. I am saying that mismanagement was the major
factor in the decline of AT&T.

Well then you are saying that that the lawsuit was not the major factor
so why did you say that you were not saying that?

I said that the lawsuit was not a major factor in the breakup. The
company was mismanaged seriously starting around 1970 any you cannot
blame that on a lawsuit later. AT&T did not learn the lesson of the
Carterphone decision years before and it was downhill ever since.

The latter-day management had no vision
of what the company could be.

They had no choice. The Justice Department decided what it could be.

That breakup was negotiated between AT&T and the Justice Department. It
made things simpler for both sides. AT&T did not think they could get
away with unloading the operating companies and keep the high profit
stuff. The Justice Department did not really understand that and just
accepted things.

They played catch-up with the competition,
so were always behind in product offerings.

They had no competition until the lawsuit.

Sure there was. What became SPRINT was around. It was a private network
for the Southern Pacific Railroad, in direct competition with Long Lines.

How did it go about competing when there was no way to get a phone call
onto SPRINT's lines other than through AT&T?

They bought stuff from China
and wondered why Western Electric (later spun into Lucent) had trouble
selling stuff.

"Selling stuff" was a small part of their business.

Selling stuff was the Entire business of Western Electric. They sold all
the equipment the operating companies used except maybe toilet paper and
Scotch Tape. Central Offices, PBXs, telephones, wire, ...

After the lawsuit.

Their hardware and software in central office equipment
was sloppy and unmanageable, so operating companies started buying stuff
like that from Siemans and Ericcson instead.

There were no "Operating Companies" until after the lawsuit.

If I remember correctly, there were 22 operating companies before. E.g.,
New England Bell, New York Telephone, New Jersey Bell, Chesapeake and
Potomac, Southern Bell, South Central Bell, South Western Bell,

All subsidiaries of AT&T.

When they were finally
allowed to make computers for other purposes than just driving
electronic central offices, they mismanaged that so badly that they
decided to stop that and to buy an existing computer company instead.

They wouldn't have had to make computers for any other purpose without
the lawsuit.

Sure they would.

Why?

They used lots of computers internally, and they wanted
to sell them.

Which would be moving away from their core competency.

They were early pioneers in making computers even before
WW-II.

Do tell us about the computer that AT&T made before WWII.

They made of the first transistorized computers. About that time,
in an earlier case, the Justice Department made them stop making
computers, and the teams working on them were broken up, partly by mass
resignations of people who went to work for independent computer
manufacturers.

They chose National Cash Register, not because they made great
computers, but because they were cheap. After a few years of mismanaging
NCR, they spun it off at half the price they paid for it because they
had messed it up so bad. The Sadim touch (opposite of Midas), where
everything they touched turned to $hit.

I am saying (now; I did not say this in my post) that losing that
lawsuit was a really great opportunity for the AT&T, and they wasted
that opportunity completely.

Only if you want them to be something other than what they were, the
telephone company.

They were much much more than a telephone company.

They were the telephone company. That was their core competency.

They engaged in much
fundamental research only tangentially related to telephones. For
example, Davisson and Germer's discovery that electrons were both waves
and particles (Nobel prize in physics), Ives' discovery of retardation
of atomic clocks, invention of transistor instead of just making better
telephone relays, ...

A couple of posts earlier you said they neglected research. You're
talking out of both sides of your mouth here.

RCA had a similar problem at Sarnoff Research Center. The bean
counters
did not realize how important research was (as contrasted to short-term
product development) and wanted to close it down to improve short term
profits. Now RCA is no more. They had to get out of the computer
business even though they knew it was their future. They realized that a
large proportion of their products were the results of work done in the
previous 10 years at Sarnoff, but the bean counters won.

The entire US consumer electronics industry is no more, why single out
RCA?

Getting rid of the 7 operating companies meant getting rid of the high
cost, labor intensive, regulated, low-profit local telephone service
part of the business, and keeping Bell Labs, Western Electric, Long
Lines, the defense business, and so on. These were all capital
intensive, low labor cost, high profit parts of the business. They would
also get rid of a lot of the overhead and excess management of running
the operating companies, so the remaining management could take care of
running the remaining business.

Except that they were not allowed to keep Western Electric or Bell Labs.

AT&T was allowed to keep Western Electric and Bell Labs. And they did
keep both until years later when they spun off Verizon, and Verizon got
them. That did not work out well and Alcatel bought Verizon, and now
Alcatel is not doing well.

And they lost their monopoly on long-distance as well which meant that
their resources were far less than they had been.

And the Operating Companies also messed up their opportunity. Bell Labs
was split into two parts, one retained by AT&T, and one jointly owned by
the 7 operating companies (BellCore).

How was this an "opportunity"?

BellCore could have dumped the unwhieldy G.E.I, streamlined management,
and managed the company. They could have become the leaders they once
were back when AT&T was well managed by people like Vail. But instead
they got Charlie Brown and Robert Allen.

How could they "become the leaders" when the entire structure of the
company had been destroyed by the government and all that was left to
them was to compete for long distance?

BellCore could have cut the
thickness of one 6 or 7 inch thick book of rules and regulations to
about 2 inches (The G.E.I.), but they did not. They had all the same bad
management as the AT&T part had. And since the operating companies did
not manufacture anything, they had trouble supporting BellCore
financially since they could not justify it to all the Public Utility
Commissions. So they didn't support it. I do not know if BellCore even
exists anymore. There are descendants of descendants of BellCore but
just as the present AT&T has little in common with the old one, the
present descendant has little to do with communication research.

And all due to the lawsuit.

Every single "problem" you list is the result of the actions of MCI's
lawyers.





Nonsense. They played a part, but AT&T would have fallen apart
regardless. It might have taken a little longer.

Perhaps it would, perhaps it wouldn't. We'll never know because it was
destroyed by the lawyers.

Note that AT&T is still around. The *******s that sued them aren't.

In article , says...

PeterN wrote:
On 5/8/2013 10:45 PM, Jean-David Beyer wrote:
On 05/08/2013 04:49 PM, J. Clarke wrote:
In article 79bf218c-4aab-4dce-8f0c-
, says...

On May 7, 12:48 pm, Bowser wrote:

Bell was not done in by "change", it was done in by lawyers.

The Bell System was "done in" by the major shifts in the
economic model of the telecommunications business
brought about by new technologies.

Lawyers are merely the people who deal with the result
of such problems, not the cause.

Filing a lawsuit against AT*T so that MCI could make more profits is not
a "result".

"J. Clarke" wrote:
In article , says...

PeterN wrote:
On 5/9/2013 12:48 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
So you're saying that the MCI lawsuit that resulted in the breakup of
AT&T into 7 different companies and forced the divestiture of Western
Electric and Bell Labs was not the major factor in the decline of AT&T?


See my prior post. It was not. The problem is when you
put money into research and development, it adversely
impacts the bottom line, for accounting purposes. Lower
bottom line = lower bonuses for management.

Neither of those descriptions relate to the history of AT&T.

Think "Information Age". In 1940 it was a company based
on the economics of message traffic. By 1960 there were
predictions on when revenue from message traffic would
drop below revenue from byte oriented data traffic.

Corporate AT&T was frozen and unable to respond to the
changes that occured as those predictions became true.

Literally within months of the day the data traffic
revenues rose above message traffic revenues the AT&T
Board of Directors threw in the towel, disolved the
company as it existed, sold off the parts, and went
home.

Now that is a fine piece of revisionism.

It is history, and a fact. Look it up.

What it also is, is relatively unknown. There are
probably very few people outside of the telecom industry
that were even aware of that change in revenue
generation, and of course the predictions and tracking
of it were and are proprietary information that was not
typically divulged outside of AT&T.

But if you carefully look at changes made by the Board
of Directors in the 1990's, particularly with new CEO's,
every single change was intended to shift executive
management away from the corporate culture that saw
message traffic as the source of all operating revenue
(which had been the very basis of the Bell System
monopoly prior to Judge Green's ruling).

None of those selected from within the company were able
to redirect a staid and entrenched management. So they
went outside the company. And what they learned was that
it just wasn't possible.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

"J. Clarke" wrote:
In article ,
says...

On 05/09/2013 01:02 PM, J. Clarke wrote:
In article ,
says...

When they were finally
allowed to make computers for other purposes than just driving
electronic central offices, they mismanaged that so badly that they
decided to stop that and to buy an existing computer company instead.

They wouldn't have had to make computers for any other purpose without
the lawsuit.

Sure they would.

Why?

Because all switching systems from the advent of the crossbar on
were in fact computers.

When common control, not just of the computer but of the entire
signaling system for the PSTN, was implemented there was no way
to operate any telecom system without computers.

They used lots of computers internally, and they wanted
to sell them.

Which would be moving away from their core competency.

That depends on which computers. First, Bell Labs most
certainly had some of the finest computer research being
done, going back to the beginning no matter how you want
to define "beginning". But second, of "core competency"
means telecommunications, as in selling switching
systems to the rest of the world, then selling computers
was absolutely part of their core competency.

They were early pioneers in making computers even before
WW-II.

Do tell us about the computer that AT&T made before WWII.

Everything related to "digital" that produced a digital
computer, was based on Bell Labs research. Crossbar
switching systems were first installed during WWII
(1943), but of course the mass of R&D that that produced
them was done much prior.

PCM of course was fully specified back in the 1930's.

....
I am saying (now; I did not say this in my post) that losing that
lawsuit was a really great opportunity for the AT&T, and they wasted
that opportunity completely.

Only if you want them to be something other than what they were, the
telephone company.

They were much much more than a telephone company.

They were the telephone company. That was their core competency.

That was at the core of their competency, but clearly their core
competency extended far beyond...

....
Nonsense. They played a part, but AT&T would have fallen apart
regardless. It might have taken a little longer.

Perhaps it would, perhaps it wouldn't. We'll never know because it was
destroyed by the lawyers.

Note that AT&T is still around. The *******s that sued them aren't.

That a great bit of imagination.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

"J. Clarke" wrote:
In article , says...

PeterN wrote:
On 5/8/2013 10:45 PM, Jean-David Beyer wrote:
On 05/08/2013 04:49 PM, J. Clarke wrote:
In article 79bf218c-4aab-4dce-8f0c-
, says...

On May 7, 12:48 pm, Bowser wrote:

Bell was not done in by "change", it was done in by lawyers.

The Bell System was "done in" by the major shifts in the
economic model of the telecommunications business
brought about by new technologies.

Lawyers are merely the people who deal with the result
of such problems, not the cause.

Filing a lawsuit against AT*T so that MCI could make more profits is not
a "result".

Yes it is. And one that is inevitable when regulations
are in place.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

On 05/10/2013 12:28 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
They bought stuff from China
and wondered why Western Electric (later spun into Lucent) had trouble
selling stuff.
"Selling stuff" was a small part of their business.
Selling stuff was the Entire business of Western Electric. They sold all
the equipment the operating companies used except maybe toilet paper and
Scotch Tape. Central Offices, PBXs, telephones, wire, ...
After the lawsuit.

Balony. They sold stuff even before they were purchased by AT&T way back
in the fogs of time.
That was Western Electric's only reason for existance (except for
defense contracting military systems such as the M-33 fire control
system, the Nike missile systems, Safeguard anti-ballistic missile
system, ...). AT&T did not keep them around as a hobby. They made all
the equipment used by the 22 operating companies for most of a century.
Do tell us about the computer that AT&T made before WWII.

http://history-computer.com/ModernCo...s/Stibitz.html

They made of the first transistorized computers. About that time,
in an earlier case, the Justice Department made them stop making
computers, and the teams working on them were broken up, partly by mass
resignations of people who went to work for independent computer
manufacturers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRADIC

They chose National Cash Register, not because they made great
computers, but because they were cheap. After a few years of mismanaging
NCR, they spun it off at half the price they paid for it because they
had messed it up so bad. The Sadim touch (opposite of Midas), where
everything they touched turned to $hit.

I am saying (now; I did not say this in my post) that losing that
lawsuit was a really great opportunity for the AT&T, and they wasted
that opportunity completely.
Only if you want them to be something other than what they were, the
telephone company.
They were much much more than a telephone company.
They were the telephone company. That was their core competency.

My father can lick your father.

They engaged in much
fundamental research only tangentially related to telephones. For
example, Davisson and Germer's discovery that electrons were both waves
and particles (Nobel prize in physics), Ives' discovery of retardation
of atomic clocks, invention of transistor instead of just making better
telephone relays, ...
A couple of posts earlier you said they neglected research. You're
talking out of both sides of your mouth here.


That company was in business over 100 years. The deterioration, as it
seemed to me at the time, started in the early 1970s, although it
probably was already happening at the time of the Carterphone decision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone

For decades, they were possibly the premier technical research
laboratory in the world. For decades, they were getting a patent a day.
And 13 Nobel prizes. They did not get them for the Princess telephone.

From about 1925 until I left at the end of 1989, the Bell Labs
presidents had a pretty good idea of the importance of basic research,
for example. Problems ensued when AT&T and Western Electric (joint
owners of Bell Labs) got too interested in short-term development and
did not understand that basic research was the future. Bell Labs'
charter ensured that both basic research and product development were
done. It is my impression that basic research was about 10% of what was
done there, and development was around 75% or so. Then in the 1980s,
some badly understood work was started on a huge scale, gobbling up
resources including management attention. President of Bell Labs was a
big deal until about then, but the bean counters at AT&T did not
understand research (or even development, actually), and things went to
hell.

Think about the economy of the United States and how Bell Labs affected
it. If Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley had been told to design better
relay contacts, and if they did not quit, they would have designed
better relay contacts. Instead, they were interested in the physics of
the solid state. What has that to do with telephones? They just invented
the transistor, that's all. It is true that AT&T never made a success at
manufacturing transistors, but companies like Texas Instruments,
Fairchild, RCA, Philco, and a few others made a success of it. Changed
the economy of the whole world. Now there is a computer in my cell
phone, several computers in my car, ... . That cell phone has more
compute power than the IBM 704 I first used in the late 1950s that cost
$680/ an hour to rent and required two trained operators per shift to
run it.

Jean-David Beyer wrote:
On 05/10/2013 12:28 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
They bought stuff from China
and wondered why Western Electric (later spun into Lucent) had trouble
selling stuff.
"Selling stuff" was a small part of their business.
Selling stuff was the Entire business of Western Electric. They sold all
the equipment the operating companies used except maybe toilet paper and
Scotch Tape. Central Offices, PBXs, telephones, wire, ...
After the lawsuit.

Balony. They sold stuff even before they were purchased by AT&T way back
in the fogs of time.
That was Western Electric's only reason for existance (except for
defense contracting military systems such as the M-33 fire control
system, the Nike missile systems, Safeguard anti-ballistic missile
system, ...). AT&T did not keep them around as a hobby. They made all
the equipment used by the 22 operating companies for most of a century.

But "selling stuff" actually was not the purpose of
WECO. It was the *manufacturing* arm of the Bell
System. Their purpose was to provide equipment to the
Bell System. They were not pricing equipment for sale,
to make a profit, nor for sale to just anyone.

Indeed the relationship between WECO and various Bell
operating companies was more political than one of a
company selling goods to a customer. WECO provided
BOC's what ATT corporate allowed, not what they wanted
or what they were willing to buy. The "favored" BOC's
were at the top of the list for new technology, and
others languished in the backwaters of corporate
politics.

The cost of equipment to a BOC was not based on cost of
manufacture, cost of acquisition, nor on profit and loss
for WECO. It was based on what Corporate wanted the
books to show the regulators.

And that is precisely the reason that the DOJ was able
to convince Judge Green that it was impossible to
regulate the Bell System as a monopoly. The
manipulation was legal and it was extreme and it was
effective.

It didn't make anything efficient though, except the
administration of the Bell System as a regulated
monopoly!

From about 1925 until I left at the end of 1989, the Bell Labs
presidents had a pretty good idea of the importance of basic research,
for example. Problems ensued when AT&T and Western Electric (joint
owners of Bell Labs) got too interested in short-term development and
did not understand that basic research was the future. Bell Labs'
charter ensured that both basic research and product development were
done. It is my impression that basic research was about 10% of what was
done there, and development was around 75% or so. Then in the 1980s,
some badly understood work was started on a huge scale, gobbling up
resources including management attention. President of Bell Labs was a
big deal until about then, but the bean counters at AT&T did not
understand research (or even development, actually), and things went to
hell.

Incidentally, that fits my understanding of the time frame too.

I would not suggest that it started before 1984, but certainly the
changes with divestiture were very important.

Think about the economy of the United States and how Bell Labs affected
it. If Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley had been told to design better
relay contacts, and if they did not quit, they would have designed
better relay contacts. Instead, they were interested in the physics of
the solid state. What has that to do with telephones? They just invented
the transistor, that's all. It is true that AT&T never made a success at
manufacturing transistors, but companies like Texas Instruments,
Fairchild, RCA, Philco, and a few others made a success of it. Changed
the economy of the whole world. Now there is a computer in my cell
phone, several computers in my car, ... . That cell phone has more
compute power than the IBM 704 I first used in the late 1950s that cost
$680/ an hour to rent and required two trained operators per shift to
run it.

Goes to the core of just what their core capabilities were!

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

In article , says...

"J. Clarke" wrote:
In article , says...

PeterN wrote:
On 5/9/2013 12:48 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
So you're saying that the MCI lawsuit that resulted in the breakup of
AT&T into 7 different companies and forced the divestiture of Western
Electric and Bell Labs was not the major factor in the decline of AT&T?


See my prior post. It was not. The problem is when you
put money into research and development, it adversely
impacts the bottom line, for accounting purposes. Lower
bottom line = lower bonuses for management.

Neither of those descriptions relate to the history of AT&T.

Think "Information Age". In 1940 it was a company based
on the economics of message traffic. By 1960 there were
predictions on when revenue from message traffic would
drop below revenue from byte oriented data traffic.

Corporate AT&T was frozen and unable to respond to the
changes that occured as those predictions became true.

Literally within months of the day the data traffic
revenues rose above message traffic revenues the AT&T
Board of Directors threw in the towel, disolved the
company as it existed, sold off the parts, and went
home.

Now that is a fine piece of revisionism.

It is history, and a fact. Look it up.

What it also is, is relatively unknown. There are
probably very few people outside of the telecom industry
that were even aware of that change in revenue
generation, and of course the predictions and tracking
of it were and are proprietary information that was not
typically divulged outside of AT&T.

But if you carefully look at changes made by the Board
of Directors in the 1990's, particularly with new CEO's,
every single change was intended to shift executive
management away from the corporate culture that saw
message traffic as the source of all operating revenue
(which had been the very basis of the Bell System
monopoly prior to Judge Green's ruling).

None of those selected from within the company were able
to redirect a staid and entrenched management. So they
went outside the company. And what they learned was that
it just wasn't possible.

So you're saying that somehow MCI just conveniently filed suit and the
Justice Department conveniently ruled on exactly the scheduled that AT&T
wanted?

In article , says...

"J. Clarke" wrote:
In article ,
says...

On 05/09/2013 01:02 PM, J. Clarke wrote:
In article ,
says...

When they were finally
allowed to make computers for other purposes than just driving
electronic central offices, they mismanaged that so badly that they
decided to stop that and to buy an existing computer company instead.

They wouldn't have had to make computers for any other purpose without
the lawsuit.

Sure they would.

Why?

Because all switching systems from the advent of the crossbar on
were in fact computers.

For a very loose definition of "computer".

When common control, not just of the computer but of the entire
signaling system for the PSTN, was implemented there was no way
to operate any telecom system without computers.

And yet somehow it was managed.

They used lots of computers internally, and they wanted
to sell them.

Which would be moving away from their core competency.

That depends on which computers. First, Bell Labs most
certainly had some of the finest computer research being
done, going back to the beginning no matter how you want
to define "beginning". But second, of "core competency"
means telecommunications, as in selling switching
systems to the rest of the world, then selling computers
was absolutely part of their core competency.

AT&T's main line of business was not "selling switching system to the
rest of the world". They were a service company with hardware
secondary. Their core competency was delivering telephone service
cheaply and reliably.

They were early pioneers in making computers even before
WW-II.

Do tell us about the computer that AT&T made before WWII.

Everything related to "digital" that produced a digital
computer, was based on Bell Labs research. Crossbar
switching systems were first installed during WWII
(1943), but of course the mass of R&D that that produced
them was done much prior.

PCM of course was fully specified back in the 1930's.

You have not demonstrated the existence of a computer made by AT&T prior
to WWII. That was your assertion, not that research into digital
signalling was conducted. Perhaps you don't understand that the word
"computer" is not a generic catch-all for digital technology--a 7401
quad nand gate is a digital device, but it is a long way from being a
computer.

...
I am saying (now; I did not say this in my post) that losing that
lawsuit was a really great opportunity for the AT&T, and they wasted
that opportunity completely.

Only if you want them to be something other than what they were, the
telephone company.

They were much much more than a telephone company.

They were the telephone company. That was their core competency.

That was at the core of their competency, but clearly their core
competency extended far beyond...

You aren't by any chance a former president who didn't have sex with
that woman are you?

...
Nonsense. They played a part, but AT&T would have fallen apart
regardless. It might have taken a little longer.

Perhaps it would, perhaps it wouldn't. We'll never know because it was
destroyed by the lawyers.

Note that AT&T is still around. The *******s that sued them aren't.

That a great bit of imagination.

In what universe?