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WORLDCOM'S LUCKY DAYWORLDCOM, ONE OF THE world's biggest suppliers of Internet access, just got even bigger when it agreed to buy America Online's communications operation. The odd thing is that WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers was hardly thinking about the Net a year ago. It was all a happy accident. In a recent interview, Ebbers recalls how WorldCom last year was just a commercial long-distance phone company. But on Aug. 12, 1996, he finally decided, after many sleepless nights, to merge with MFS Communications, concluding that MFS' business-oriented local phone service would be just the right extension of WorldCom's business. Little did Ebbers know that MFS executives would announce that very day their own kind of diversification--the purchase of UUNET Technologies, the world's biggest Internet service provider. So three months later, when WorldCom and MFS completed their merger, Ebbers also bagged UUNET. Ebbers credits UUNET's chief executive, John Sidgmore with devising WorldCom's recent complex deal to buy CompuServe, hand over its 2.6 million consumer subscribers to America Online, and gain AOL's communications apparatus. ''We didn't really understand the Internet when we bought MFS,'' says Ebbers. He does now.
EDITED BY PAT WECHSLER
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Updated Sept. 25, 1997 by bwwebmaster
Copyright 1997, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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