

The Sony Hack and Nortel's Demise: Piracy vs. Crown Jewel Theft - nzonbi
http://www.forbes.com/sites/valleyvoices/2015/01/21/the-sony-hack-and-nortels-demise-piracy-vs-crown-jewel-theft/

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PeterWhittaker
Were the Chinese spying on Nortel? Perhaps. Was this a proximate cause of
Nortel's collapse? Seems unlikely that it was even a distal cause and more
likely that insiders - such as the person quoted in the CBC article - are
attempting to either deflect blame and attention to outside factors or are
attempting to maintain their wilfull ignorance of the management rot within
the former corporate behemoth.

I worked for several years at BNR, Nortel's old R&D division, then joined a
group that spun out of Nortel. A lot of folks pursued that path when they
could or simply left for other more entrepreneurial places, because of
Nortel's culture and poor management. It was a sluggish dinosaur of a company
with barely an entrepreneurial bone and a huge sense of entitlement,
entitlement both to government assistance and to the old ways (the 40 year
copper renewal cycle, etc.).

Why the diatribe? Because citing Nortel as evidence in favour of one's
arguments in this case diminishes the value of those arguments, makes the
whole thesis suspect.

Nortel collapsed due to bad management. End of story.

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Terr_
Given how much I dislike DRM etc. from Big Copyright, I was surprised how
often I found myself nodding agreeably to this editorial.

I wonder how much this ties into conceptions (dare I say, prejudices?) some
non-technical leaders have, where their technology-side is seen more as a
cost-center rather than an ongoing investment.

