BillMorrow
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Clearwire: Erik Prusch to take over as CEO
Precisely five months since the last time Clearwire had a permanent CEO in place, a new boss has been selected to take the place of Bill Morrow. Being promoted to the position is Erik Prusch, the company's Chief Operating Officer, who will be faced with a monstrous challenge: secure roughly $600 million in capital to fund Clearwire's buildout of LTE. If none can be found, the company will be completely out of cash by the end of 2012. Fortunately, he's got some talent to help him in the arduous quest; backing Prusch as the Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors will be John Stanton, who's served as the interim CEO since Morrow's departure. Given the situation, it's a difficult position to be placed in -- either he'll be the hero that saves the company, or the villain responsible for taking it down. Check out the full press release after the break.
Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow resigns
Citing "personal reasons," Clearwire boss Bill Morrow has rather suddenly stepped down from his positions both as CEO and executive board director. Replacing him on an interim basis will be John Stanton, current chairman of the board and former CEO of VoiceStream (a company you may know better as T-Mobile USA). Now, it's no secret that Clearwire has been under a bit of pain lately -- it's scaled back its ambitious growth plans and shelved its retail strategy, not to mention the fact that 4G partner Sprint has been seen carousing with both LightSquared and T-Mobile lately -- so it stands to reason that Morrow may have had a little help being shown the door. Follow the break for Clearwire's full press release.
Clearwire sticking with WiMAX until at least 2012
Clearwire always seems to have commitment issue. Despite going steady with WiMAX, the company keeps saying that they might eventually part ways for different pastures -- namely LTE, should WiMAX turn out to be a dead end (talk about relationship pressure). That's still ongoing, as CEO Bill Morrow recently explained to CNET that its contract with Intel has been amended so that "either party can terminate the technology agreement within 30 days" but later adding that it definitely wouldn't hop on the LTE bandwagon before 2012. He strikes down some false hope a question later: "we won't be upgrading to LTE, if we do that, for a long time." Granted, time is a relative construct, and two years may be a "long time" to Bill. Oh, why do you keep stringing 'em both along?
