Sprint-Nextel Joins the "Worst Mergers in History" Club

Well, it's pretty official. Today, Sprint Nextel said it is writing down most of the $35 billion Sprint paid for Nextel just three short years ago, resulting in a $29.5 billion loss for the quarter.

Talk about blowing a big one. I followed Nextel for years as it rose from iffy beginnings to becoming one of the first national wireless networks. The merger, engineered by previous Sprint CEO Gary Forsee, didn't have a lot of fans from the start. The companies had conflicting cultures and technologies -- Nextel ran on a one-of-a-kind wireless system called IDEN, and Sprint runs on widely-used standard CDMA. The great thing about IDEN was its groundbreaking push-to-talk technology. The bad thing was that, for phone calls, it never worked that well.

Now Sprint Nextel's new CEO, Dan Hesse, is acknowledging that the merger was a failure and will try to move on. Sprint desperately needs to stabilize and get aggressive and innovative. It's been losing customers and is getting hammered by the nation's two biggest wireless carriers, AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

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