Right out of the gate, an MCI price hike

Large users wonder which company's history and culture will dominate the new entity when it comes time to sign the next contract. WorldCom is in the driver's seat, but it cannot run the combined company without the MCI engine.

Will MCI WorldCom be an entrepreneur, anxious to win new accounts and strengthen existing ones by accommodating customer needs, as WorldCom has been willing to do?

Or will it treat the customer as an adversary, exploiting the tariff system to file price hikes in the middle of contracts and and offering standard, and sometimes reprehensible, terms on a take-it-or-leave-it basis?

The first description once described MCI, but recently the company has taken rigid contract positions and played the price-ratcheting game. Nevertheless, large users with substantial international operations have flocked to MCI recently because MCI and BT, unlike AT&T or Sprint, have had the ability to make a global deal happen. But with the collapse of the MCI/BT merger, BT will become the single parent of Concert, which will be less appealing in the U.S. market as a result. MCI will lose that particular advantage over its U.S. competitors in the eyes of U.S.-based companies doing multinational deals.

Still, two other elements of the merger could offer plenty of compensation for large users. The combination of UUNET, MFS and MCI Systemhouse into a single entity will create a strong option for companies considering data outsourcing. In addition, MFS's local service operations in numerous cities could pump much-needed life into MCI Metro, making the new WorldCom a better one-stop shop for interexchange and local products than MCI ever was.

Of course, this will succeed only if WorldCom can integrate its various lines of business. And that's one area in which WorldCom has not been WorldClass.