41–50 of 137 posts
West is littered with graveyards of companies hollowed out by Chinese Industrial Espionage. ASMC comes to mind. https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/chinese-win...
Julian Assange originally became famous after getting caught hacking Nortel back in the early 90s. I guess Nortel didn't learn from that lesson and secure their network.
There's a lot here beyond just the hacking. Huawei was able to grow so insanely fast because they had access to a blank check and endless credit from the Chinese government. Nortel and others meanwhile had to finance things themselves. Private companies cannot compete with governments. Governments, especially those with sovereign currencies, can do things that private companies simply cannot do and have pockets far d…
My 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…
Be sure to explain to your parents that this particular news outlet (Bloomberg) has a history of playing fast and loose with reality, particularly in regard to supposed Chinese industrial espionage activities. [1] Also you might point out that the company pays bonuses to its "journalists" for successfully affecting financial markets. [2] 1: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-... 2: https://ww…
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Be sure to explain to your parents that this particular news outlet (Bloomberg) has a history of playing fast and loose with reality, particularly in regard to supposed Chinese industrial espionage activities. [1] Also you might point out that the company pays bonuses to its "journalists" for successfully affecting financial markets. [2] 1: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-... 2: https://ww…
Yeah - I was shocked to see that "The Big Hack" was their suggested "read next" article. You'd think they wouldn't want to remind people about it.
Nortel 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.
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Are you suggesting that Nortel wasn't hacked by the Chinese?
The article itself suggests that it's a possibility. There's no evidence connecting the hack to Nortel's flagging fortunes, and there's no evidence connecting Huawei's success to the information in the hack. The article makes a much stronger argument that effective Chinese government support of Huawei and the failure of the Canadian government to support Nortel, as well as Huawei's ability to hire away many of Nortel…
Is "China bad" how HN and the US is going to look for the next 20 years as North America goes down the hill?
For an actual science based look at Nortel there was a good study done by a team at the Tefler School of Business years ago.[1] Taking an extensive look at the corporate culture and the state of the business which was despite dotcom evaluations in a pretty sorry state already. Tracing the decay back to the 80s and 90s and a whole row of disastrous decisions.
[1](https://obj.ca/article/nortels-failure-was-years-making-telf...)
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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 mec…
Spoiler: not exactly in good taste, but rather less outrageous than you might think.
My 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…
I interned at Nortel in early 2000's right before it all went down. I can tell you the engineering culture was rotten within. No-one was doing anything useful for years. Many orgs were built around milking the ancient layer 2 passport switch. The layer 3 router meant to compete with Cisco was 3 years late and only sold a few dozen units. There was accounting fraud going on at the highest level - delivery trucks circl…
It was an insane place to get my first "office job" experience. Entire buildings of hundreds of people all working on powerpoint reports about potential training ideas for future projects to improve the production of the powerpoint presentations made to summarize the reports on internal "sales" numbers that are then filed without anyone reading them because everyone knew they were too fudged to matter and the internal competition thing was a smokescreen for fraud anyway. Who was embezzling what this week were conversations coop students got to overhear.
I was there shortly before the whole thing collapsed and right before it did, in my department, there was a lot of boat shopping combined with clock watching as they waited for options to vest before the whole thing fell apart (everyone knew it would soon).
