The short answer is no. It didn't help, but it wasn't the only thing. 1. Around that time, I worked for a telecom startup down the street from Nortel in Kanata

The short answer is no. It didn't help, but it wasn't the only thing. 1. Around that time, I worked for a telecom startup down the street from Nortel in Kanata. It went bankrupt after Worldcom dupped us into thinking it was buying our tech. It was a lie, and Worldcom was cooking the books. Telecom was starting to implode. Who knows who else was lying. 2. EVERYBODY in Ottawa knew someone that worked at Nortel. How could one, or a few hacks, take the work product of thousands of thousands of people and create another products. Heck, I can barely understand some of the open source products, and they have docs! Maybe they solved a problem of how some things were being done?! Either way, it's one thing to get ahead, it's another to stay ahead. 3. My good friend at the time was one of those that went down with the ship. Lost all his stocks and years and years of work at Nortel. He was a senior engineer and he told me mismanagement was starting to happen from the late 80s. Even in the late 90s, Nortel was throwing so many parties, and hiring anyone. They were just burning money. We always wondered where did they get all the money and how could they afford to hire so many people that barely qualified?!? I don't claim to have all the answers, but like most things in life, it's not one cut that kills you, it's the other 999.