Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?
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Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?
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Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?
#2Research In Motion > Nortel.
Nortel built bad routers. RIM created blackberries, the smartphones before smartphones were a thing.
Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?
#3Research In Motion > Nortel. Nortel built bad routers. RIM created blackberries, the smartphones before smartphones were a thing.
Obama kept a BlackBerry as his personal phone for most of his presidency.
https://money.cnn.com/2014/05/22/technology/security/nsa-oba...
Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?
#4Research In Motion > Nortel. Nortel built bad routers. RIM created blackberries, the smartphones before smartphones were a thing.
Not going to argue your point about products, but from a financial standpoint, RIMM/Blackberry's peak market cap was about $81 billion in 2008.
Nortel's peak was $283 billion in 2000. Nortel was huge. Of course, the market was in a huge bubble at the time.
Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?
#5My parents lost a small fortune in 2001 riding the tech crash down (Nortel was a good chunk of that). I've been trying to explain to them (1st gen Chinese immigrants) for the past three years that Nortel was killed partly by focused Chinese spying and IP-theft by Huawei. CSIS has know about this for years. They (my parents) just wouldn't believe it until I showed them this article.
Their former university classmates (who also immigrated to Canada) are likely part of the 20 people that jumped ship to Huawei and implicitly may have leaked data before then.
I'm glad this article got through to them, that it isn't just politics and Huawei & the CCP really did go offside.
Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?
#6Nortel Market Cap Peak per year, in $USD Billions:
1997: $16
1998: $22
1999: $105
2000: $283
2001: $56
2002: $26
The dot com bubble produced insane valuations around the turn of the century. The run-up to the collapse was breathtaking.
Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?
#7Research In Motion > Nortel. Nortel built bad routers. RIM created blackberries, the smartphones before smartphones were a thing.
Did you even read the article?
Nortel built a lot of cellular networks and owned a huge chunk if IP for it (that was surprisingly valuable during the bankruptcy auctions). They also had quite the large long-haul fiber optic install base (which they bet the farm on, that quickly became commodified, which is really what bankrupted them). They also had one of the first commercially available DSL modems.
Sure, they built “bad” edge routers and switches (they came out of the telco industry, so focused too much on managed services for them, which caused headaches for end-customers), but the company was an engineering powerhouse ruined by hubristic businessmen.
Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?
#8Nortel Market Cap Peak per year, in $USD Billions: 1997: $16 1998: $22 1999: $105 2000: $283 2001: $56 2002: $26 The dot com bubble produced insane valuations around the turn of the century. The run-up to the collapse was breathtaking.
Dang, so someone who invested in 1997 would have still made money in 2002, though they would have a lot of psychological pain from the ride down from the peak.
Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?
#9Research In Motion > Nortel. Nortel built bad routers. RIM created blackberries, the smartphones before smartphones were a thing.
Did you even read the article? Nortel built a lot of cellular networks and owned a huge chunk if IP for it (that was surprisingly valuable during the bankruptcy auctions). They also had quite the large long-haul fiber optic install base (which they bet the farm on, that quickly became commodified, which is really what bankrupted them). They also had one of the first commercially available DSL modems. Sure, they built…
Oh, I read it. I also lived with Nortel gear during this timeframe. They were not great at much of anything. They were more often the only game in town, and they knew it. Canadian schools and government agencies bought their gear because it was canadian not because it was any good. Those touchscreen tablet controller things? Does anyone remember how bad touchscreens were in those days? Give me a blackberry with a mechanical keyboard.
>> In 1999 the co-founder of Corel Corp., who’d gotten his start at Nortel’s precursor company, threw a gala at which his wife showed up in a C$1 million leather bodysuit with an anatomically correct gold breastplate and a 15-carat-diamond nipple.
That was the attitude of people running nortel at the time. Some consider it the canadian enron: the unicorn that ate itself.
Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?
#10Research In Motion > Nortel. Nortel built bad routers. RIM created blackberries, the smartphones before smartphones were a thing.
Not going to argue your point about products, but from a financial standpoint, RIMM/Blackberry's peak market cap was about $81 billion in 2008. Nortel's peak was $283 billion in 2000. Nortel was huge. Of course, the market was in a huge bubble at the time.
Nortel also got a bit larger than RIM by sales. Nortel's peak was $22.2 billion in fiscal year 2000, with $1.7b in operating income.
RIM peaked at $19.9 billion in sales in 2011. Amazingly they tripled in size from $6b in sales in 2008, in just three years. Then lost 85% of their sales in another four years after that.