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“Was it Huawei? Hard to say. But whoever hacked Nortel attacked my community, in my mind.” When the managerial class have finished abusing and ripping value fr

“Was it Huawei? Hard to say. But whoever hacked Nortel attacked my community, in my mind.” When the managerial class have finished abusing and ripping value from the company and its workers, it is a classic for them to lay the blame with the others: the inhuman Japanese, the dirty Mexicans, the cheating Chinese - they took your job and stole your wealth - not us, we are on your side. Amazing how it still works and how little people learn from their own history.

DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
The xenophobic blame game is always absurd. In this case, it doesn't even make basic chronological sense. Nortel collapsed before Huawei even established a major international presence. Huawei was barely even selling in the same markets as Nortel. There were many reasons for Nortel's collapse: huge numbers of unprofitable acquisitions during the dot com bubble, the collapse of the bubble, the fall in demand for networking gear after the bubble, financial fraud. To pin the blame on a company that was barely even competing with Nortel at the time, and which just so happens to be the bogeyman in 2021, is just too convenient.
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  I don't know the details of Nortel, but I saw Ericsson post dot-com bubble from the inside, and that company was being stripped of anything of value, right down to cancelling cleaning and free fruits in the office over outsourcing everything to the cheapest bidder. The rise of ZTE and Huawei comes much later (around the introduction of 4G - they start winning contracts in Scandinavia), and to me mostly because they were willing to invest in research at a time when western companies were not.
  - Lio 5y ago
    I'm not sure about that time line. I can remember BT replacing Marconi with Huawei backbone routers for its 21CN project, that was early 00s. Huawei, from nowhere, suddenly had very cheap networking products. So cheap they effectively killed Marconi's bid. It was an open joke at the time that they were copies of Cisco products (the other winning supplier) down to the bugs. No one cared because they were so cheap. Personally, I blame BT's executives for not seeing the value in keeping a local manufacturer (just up the road) as one of their suppliers.
    - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
      Huawei had almost no overseas revenue until 2004.[1] Nortel's collapse was well before that. By 2001, the were already headlines like this: "The story behind Nortel's fall."[2] 1. https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20200227162907806-0552:9781108550987:42643fig7_1.png https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge... 2. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-story-behind-nortels-fall/article20935077/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-story...
    - throwaway4good 5y ago
      They might had delivered some network equipment of modest importance (in the period 2005-2010), I was referring to when they started becoming prime contractors.
    - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
      > BT replacing Marconi with Huawei backbone routers for its 21CN project, that was early 00s. Just looked this up: Huawei was selected by BT in 2005. That's already about 4 years after Nortel's initial collapse, and a year after the SEC began investigating Nortel for financial fraud. Again, this illustrates how blaming Huawei for Nortel's fall doesn't make chronological sense.

DiogenesKynikos 5y ago

The xenophobic blame game is always absurd. In this case, it doesn't even make basic chronological sense. Nortel collapsed before Huawei even established a major international presence. Huawei was barely even selling in the same markets as Nortel. There were many reasons for Nortel's collapse: huge numbers of unprofitable acquisitions during the dot com bubble, the collapse of the bubble, the fall in demand for networking gear after the bubble, financial fraud. To pin the blame on a company that was barely even competing with Nortel at the time, and which just so happens to be the bogeyman in 2021, is just too convenient.

throwaway4good 5y ago
I don't know the details of Nortel, but I saw Ericsson post dot-com bubble from the inside, and that company was being stripped of anything of value, right down to cancelling cleaning and free fruits in the office over outsourcing everything to the cheapest bidder. The rise of ZTE and Huawei comes much later (around the introduction of 4G - they start winning contracts in Scandinavia), and to me mostly because they were willing to invest in research at a time when western companies were not.
- Lio 5y ago
  I'm not sure about that time line. I can remember BT replacing Marconi with Huawei backbone routers for its 21CN project, that was early 00s. Huawei, from nowhere, suddenly had very cheap networking products. So cheap they effectively killed Marconi's bid. It was an open joke at the time that they were copies of Cisco products (the other winning supplier) down to the bugs. No one cared because they were so cheap. Personally, I blame BT's executives for not seeing the value in keeping a local manufacturer (just up the road) as one of their suppliers.
  - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
    Huawei had almost no overseas revenue until 2004.[1] Nortel's collapse was well before that. By 2001, the were already headlines like this: "The story behind Nortel's fall."[2] 1. https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20200227162907806-0552:9781108550987:42643fig7_1.png https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge... 2. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-story-behind-nortels-fall/article20935077/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-story...
  - throwaway4good 5y ago
    They might had delivered some network equipment of modest importance (in the period 2005-2010), I was referring to when they started becoming prime contractors.
  - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
    > BT replacing Marconi with Huawei backbone routers for its 21CN project, that was early 00s. Just looked this up: Huawei was selected by BT in 2005. That's already about 4 years after Nortel's initial collapse, and a year after the SEC began investigating Nortel for financial fraud. Again, this illustrates how blaming Huawei for Nortel's fall doesn't make chronological sense.