Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 137 posts

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#121

Post by jiggawatts »

dig1 wrote: post #117
mytailorisrich wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nortel was not killed by Huawei or a hack. It was killed by bad management. The article tries to paint the picture of a fantastic company but that was not the case. It was mismanaged (and the article provides some glaring examples, including fraud), slow, bloated, it was really struggling in the cellular space. Even the account of the hack shows how badly Nortel handled it. There's always the temptation to find an ex…

The same happened to Nokia. People usually say that Microsoft killed it, but it was already pretty much behind everything when Microsoft took it. Too much bureaucracy, everything outsourced, management out of touch with anything, meetings after meetings... Hell, I remember two/three weeks of meetings to replace apache proxy with nginx. Actual replacement and configuration update would take a couple of minutes.

"But what if something goes wrong!?"

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#122

Post by magicnubs »

adventured wrote: post #10
blinding-streak wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I assume this is due to the advent of touchscreen phones. Around when people were getting used to the idea that mobile phones could be used for more than just making calls, touchscreens could be buggy/laggy and there wasn't haptic feedback or any sort of attempt at recreating the physical sensation of typing. RIM doubled down on physical keyboards, and Blackberrys had great ones (I could type much faster on my Blackberry Bold than on an iPhone at the time) and they already had productivity/utility apps and such since they were really PDAs. But the gradually improving touchscreen typing experience, combined with the increased utility of being able to put the keyboard away when you didn't need it, spelled the death of physical keyboard phones not long after.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#123

Post by g8oz »

jariel wrote: post #92
valuearb wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kelley Johnson’s Skunk Works was successful because it rejected government controls and oversight. Read Kelley’s 14 rules of Management. Johnson had a 15th rule that he passed on by word of mouth. According to the book "Skunk Works" the 15th rule is: "Starve before doing business with the damned Navy.“ because the Navy wouldn’t relinquish control of projects to the Skunkworks. And it’s “funding” was paid contracts fo…

You're crossing streams here. Government backed financing for equipment sales, and government procurement for defence or large projects ... these are activities are miles apart in terms of operational realities. The Chinese government is involved to this day in financing Huawei customers. This is a big 'no no' for supposedly 'free trade' because it's a huge strategic advantage for any competitor wishing to completely…

>> The Chinese government is involved to this day in financing Huawei customers. This is a big 'no no' for supposedly 'free trade'

I don't know, export finance is a tool used by many countries, the U.S included.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#124

Post by koheripbal »

Hongwei wrote: post #5

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…

Chinese nationalism is potent. ...and it's somewhat understandable to internalize some of the pride of being part of a global power that is on the rise.

For those of us of Mediterranean decent, it would be as if the Roman Empire has been rebuilt and were expanding its influence globally. It would be hard for most people not to feel some element of subconscious or conscious pride.

The same feelings helped prop up the new Caliphate in the middle east recently (until it became obvious how brutal ISIS was).

Everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#125

Post by canadian_tired »

I worked at Nortel before and during the collapse. It was a wild ride... stories abound. 100K+ employees... and they couldn't hire them fast enough. Many stories of Nortel hiring who ever they could just so the competition couldn't get them. The second most memorable day (the first being 9/11) was when Clarence Chandra did an all-hands webcast... "the perfect storm" presentation. This was the beginning of the end... we just didn't know how bad it would get. Massive projects were cut...and the employees with them. You are talking hundreds of people a week. I recall many of the people I worked around... packing up and moving home (often someplace in China) immediately. When people were laid off, they were allowed to hang out...use their computer...access stuff...before actually having to leave weeks later. I didn't work on the HW side, but I can tell you the SW repos were barely protected. The CMS (Livelink?) was pretty wide open... and if you could find what you wanted (LOL) easy to leave with it. Security was pretty lax... I'd bet many gigs of files just walked out of there on CDROMS or other media (USB sticks were not common then). I used to dig through all sorts of tech... cool stuff...probably a lot that should have been protected. It wasn't. Security was rarely talked about. All that mattered was the next release date... go go go.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#126

Post by jariel »

g8oz wrote: post #123
jariel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're crossing streams here. Government backed financing for equipment sales, and government procurement for defence or large projects ... these are activities are miles apart in terms of operational realities. The Chinese government is involved to this day in financing Huawei customers. This is a big 'no no' for supposedly 'free trade' because it's a huge strategic advantage for any competitor wishing to completely…

>> The Chinese government is involved to this day in financing Huawei customers. This is a big 'no no' for supposedly 'free trade' I don't know, export finance is a tool used by many countries, the U.S included.

Yes. This kind of what the World Bank is.

However, it's not the same thing.

Imagine if Trump Directed the Fed to print money to give to Chase Bank, to lend money to TMobile Germany to buy gear from Cisco. This would be incomprehensible to us.

So it's all a game, we need to play accordingly.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#128

Post by Fr33maan »

artsyca wrote: post #93
vkou wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too big to fail works when there's a network effect that locks your customers into you. VISA is an example of that. Reputation-based businesses (Think auditing firms) are another. Facebook is a third. On the other hand, a vendor like Nortell did not have network lockin on their customers. They could, and did end up switching vendors.

"Switching", get it?

Why this has been downvoted ?

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#130

Post by calyth2018 »

Hongwei wrote: post #5

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 work with a ton of ex-Nortel engineers in town. All of them agree that the company was grossly mismanaged. The CxOs fudge the accounting, ignored warnings about their systems, and the burden of Nortel's fall should be mainly shouldered by management.

Huawei hacks are the sideshow, the burning tire fire of management is the main act.

Your parents aren't the only ones burnt by Nortel. Lots of Nortel employees indulged with the paper gains of their stock, only for it to crater and created lots of financial strain.

But like most articles with a question as the title, the answer is typically no. This article, frankly, is trying so hard to rewrite history, to divert attention from the main act to the side show.

Post reply on HN