Martin Bouygues thought he was the only sane man left in Europe. The cautious Frenchman ran Bouygues Telecom, France's No.3 cell-phone network, and in the spring of 2000, he was under intense pressure to bid billions of euros for licenses to operate the so-called Third Generation (3G) of mobile networks. The technology behind 3G was certainly intriguing: It would turn a cell phone into the ultimate portable computer, the key to the mobile Internet. But shelling out billions just for a license in an unproven technology? To Bouygues, the scion of a French construction empire, this was sheer madness and would bankrupt the entire European telecom industry. So on May 6, he sat down to write a letter, a warning to the entire Continent. Three days later, it appeared on the front page of Le Monde. Many operators faced a grim choice, wrote Bouygues, between quitting the business―the price of not bidding for a license―or drowning in debt. "What should I tell my employees?" wrote Bouygues. "That we have a choice between a sudden death and a slow one?"
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