| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Louis Galambos and Eric John Abrahamson. Anytime, Anywhere: Entrepreneurship and the Creation of a Wireless World. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 310. $29.00.
This compact volume by Louis Galambos and Eric John Abrahamson relates the brief and turbulent story of AirTouch Communications. Spun off as a cellular telephone "pure play" from Pacific Telesis (PacTel) in late 1993, the company was swallowed up just over five years later by the British firm Vodafone. With its origins in the staid Bell Telephone system and its end in the restless global market for corporate control, AirTouch symbolizes for Galambos and Abrahamson a "decisive shift in global political economy" (p. 254), a Third Industrial Revolution in the making.	1
The world being made by Vodafone and other survivors of the whirlwind that has swept through the world's telecommunications sector was hardly imaginable to the "Bell-heads" who populate the early chapters of the book. Hemmed in by regulators, labor unions, the famed "widows and orphans" who owned its stock, and the cautious engineering and management culture that evolved in response to these constraints, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) was unable even to recognize the explosive demand waiting to be tapped by wireless phones. That market was unlocked through the relentless prodding of entrepreneurial upstarts like Motorola, MCI, and McCaw and by bold policy makers. Both groups more than made up in chutzpah what they sometimes lacked in expertise.	. . .

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