One reason for this debacle, according to Dan Colussy, who drove Iridium's buyout in 2000, was the company's refusal to update business assumptions. … - Salim Ismail

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One reason for this debacle, according to Dan Colussy, who drove Iridium's buyout in 2000, was the company's refusal to update business assumptions. "The Iridium business plan was locked in place twelve years before the system became operational," he recalls. That's a long time, long enough that it was almost impossible to predict where the state of the art in digital communications would be by the time the satellite system was at last in place. We thus label this an Iridium Moment — using linear tools and the trends of the past to predict an accelerating future.