Nortel execs killed it but there was rampant theft. I remember working on the WiMAX program and one weekend someone had downloaded years of research (Shanghai I think ) circa 2004/5 a few angry emails but remember everyone wanted the China market , outsourcing was cool etc. They brought in Motorola exec and GE exec with a background in washing machines to work in enterprise ( I cannot stress how different a line assembly is to multi service switching ). Toward the end they attempted to get a bail out but Oshawa region won out ( US car companies employing more people and more votes meant more at stake ). I joined in 1997 and left around 2008 just before the collapse. Wireless was sold to Ericsson and I heard they recouped costs in about 9 months , Nokia picked up the passports ( wan switching ) and dropped their own products … tons of stories like this. Interesting side story I joined the brand new content networking division around 2000/2001 worked on a new L4 to L7 switch ( TCP splicing and load balancing and higher ) that was developing a new network processor around Lexra cores at 10G but it all fizzled .. I do remember thinking what an absolute beast this chip would be “candlestick” would be. The cisco guys whom nearly took over had it right , down size to core networking … half staff ( it was around 40k when I started and 130k when I left ). China certainly did nefarious things but it was greed and incompetence in leadership that killed it.
Also, Mike Zafirovski (Nortel CEO) asked for financial support from Harper, who refused. Nortel had many problems, but Stephen Harper (prime minister) and his Conservatives killed Nortel and the telecom industry in Canada with this decision. Now the same people will blame China. That was the moment that ended the business.
If they were bailed, what would've changed? Even car manufacturers weren't disfunctional to the point of not being able to turn a profit on a line of product that when sold to another company took only 9 months to be profitable?
Not only that, but from what I'm understanding it seems like the entire company was compromised so deeply that almost every email/document seems to have found its way back to China. And it took years after their bankruptcy to finally get an accurate idea of how wide the breach was because Nortel itself seemed to really not care about that at all. Why then would the Canadian government bail out and finance Nortel when it amounted to bankrolling Chinese research?
I think the real mistake was to let the expertise go to complete waste, it's just mind-boggling that only Huawei was smart enough to take advantage of such a concentration of talent. The Canadian government could've let Nortel die but financed a successor to replace them, or done something to help out the engineers left in the dust
But I guess Canada has a very long history of losing every single cutting edge tech hubs it has, while doing very little about it. Because why even bother when you are a petrostate?
Bailing out the private sector every time they go bust due to incompetence won’t solve the problem (in this case, problem of management and security incompetence).
