John Legere and Marcelo Claure are just two guys trying to push their companies to the next level. Legere leads T-Mobile, and Claure leads Sprint. However, the problem isn’t the leadership, despite the battle that took place between the two men on Twitter recently. Both made waves as they went back and fourth, exchanging tweets that looked more like teenagers and trolls going at it online in profanity-laced tweets.
Legere started the altercation with a tweet, which was accompanied by a link that bashed Sprint’s new ad campaign and plans. His tweet read, “I give credit to @sprint for swinging the bat when they do – but #AllIn is a swing and a miss, guys!! #SprintLikeHell.” It was a rough tweet, but one that one wouldn’t have seen coming from Verizon or AT&T’s upper-management team. However, Legere and Claure are rebels in their own right. They’re battle for the third-most users in the U.S. and things look equally bleak for both companies, despite the gains that T-Mobile has made in recent years.
However. Claure’s response, which spanned a total of four tweets, sent additional shockwaves throughout the entire mobile industry. It read, “I am so tired of your Uncarrier bullshit when you are worse than the other two carriers together. Your cheap, misleading lease imitation is a joke. You trick people to believe that they have a 15-dollar iPhone lease payment when it’s not true. You tell them they can upgrade up to 3x, but you don’t tell them the price goes up to 27 dollars when they do. You say one thing but behave completely different. It’s all a fake show. So its really #TMobileLikeHell.”
This is an interesting debate though, because despite the growth that T-Mobile has seen, and even if the company is able to pass Sprint and become the third-largest carrier in the U.S., it won’t actually have that much impact on either company. Some have contested that a flip of the two companies would put pressure on Claure, but that’s still debatable given how poorly both companies perform against the top two carriers, AT&T and Verizon.
Perhaps at some point it will cost one of these CEO’s their job, but will that necessarily mean that either company is going to be better positioned in the market because of this fiery exchange? The simple answer to that question is a resounding “no.” The only conceivable way that these two companies make any impact on a larger scale is if they either come together, which after this exchange seems even less likely than ever before, or if an outside entity, like Google, comes in an picks up one or both carriers – creating a massive super-carrier that could compete in user-base, as well as quality with AT&T and Verizon.
Even still though, this is all speculation, and for these two CEO’s, as well as their respective companies – this is nothing more than a cinematic spectacle that will blow over and be forgotten in a matter of days. Maybe job-related stress for the two is higher than most other companies, but even for the best of companies, lashing out at other CEO’s in a profanity-laden series of tweets usually doesn’t work out for anyone involved. Here though, this is going to be a situation of “wait and see,” to understand how this will play out and what role this Twitter argument, really will have for T-Mobile and Sprint.
