I read your Nortel piece with great interest. While I agree that there was undoubtedly corporate espionage from China, Russia and France, the demise of Nortel came from a multitude of sources.

I spent 18+ years at BNR/Nortel, mostly in the IT division in Ottawa and I saw other contributing factors at play.

First, BNR/Nortel never really got past the connection oriented aspects of telephony based networks. Everything was FR/ATM. The IT division was putting in a global TCP/IP connection-less network based on Cisco routers. When we used our own products, the performance was not the same. We built voice boxes that did data networking, and not data boxes that pushed voice connections. Two totally different approaches to networking. Of course I am biased as I was a data person.

Second, Nortel’s big business was the big voice switches which had a 9 year development cycle. Nortel never understood that the data networking side in the consumer space had a nine month product cycle. Our internal development practices often killed the flexibility needed for smaller product lines. One of Nortel’s most successful PBX products, Norstar, was the result of an R&D group going rogue and bypassing a lot of sluggish processes.

Third, Nortel spent money acquiring companies and then killed them with bureaucracy. When the drunken spending binge ended, they had a lot of debt with nothing to show for it.

While it would be nice to blame others for the demise, we unfortunately drank our own kool-ade.

With regards to the espionage, I have two stories to recount. When I was cleaning out the back labs during the first phase of the meltdown, I came across a $500K electron microscope that was used to look at “chips”. Don’t know how often it was used, but I am sure some people did some “investigative” research on their own. The second story is more humorous. It appears that we had a PCB duplicator on premises. Some enterprising students fed in an Apple IIe (yes, I am that old) and created their own personal computer PCBs right down to the Apple trademarks. Management had fit over that one….

To this day, I remember a single line from the book “In Search of Excellence”, : “Just because you are successful in one line of business, doesn’t mean that you will be successful in another business”.

Thanks again, I enjoy your posts…

darn, meant to also include the ghosts of the AVRO Jetliner and Arrow.

I don’t believe anything Canada’s CSIS and CSE say because they are branchplant colonies of the U.S.

Before this National Post Feb 2020 article previous coverage never ever contained any Chinese involvement.

Just look at who got the majority of patents and took over Nortel’s massive networks.

Americans !

Oh sure, one could say Sony is Japanese, but in fact the Sony we know of was an American creation after WWII.

One can also argue that China is just as bad, but, most of what China has become since the early 1990s has been because of Americans who flooded in there after the global fall of of the pretense of Communism

I could type several books about how Canada is a U.S. colonial satellite territory, the American corporate elite deliberately keeping Canada’s population around 10 percent that of the U.S., and has been since at least the 1880s, but instead I’ll summarize all that by saying that today there are over 3 million dual-citizen ‘manager’ Americans in Canada and many more non-duals who own control and run Canada for their benefit and the U.S.

So, somebody could well ask, if true, why didn’t the U.S. simply annex Canada back in the 1880s ?

Because even before that the American corporate elite that own control and run the U.S. realized that if they did that, Americans would flood north into Canada like a tsunami consuming all of Canada’s natural resources in jiffy quick time just as they have in the U.S. That the day would come in the future when they would lose control of their global empire of resource extractions to feed the U.S. and they would need ‘at home’ reserves to fall back on. Without which their North American Empire would starve shortly thereafter. They decided to keep the pretense of the existence of a separate Canada in order to control and manage Canada’s resources to keep those resources feeding their existence.

Can Canadians do anything about it ?

Ask the ghosts of Nortel, Corel, Matrox, Future Shop, Rona, WardAir, Dome Petroleum, Bombardier, Ferranti-Packard, Eaton’s, and many more who tried and died, murdered by Americans.

steve hartwell
st catharines, ontario (canada)