Hardly surprising it's going under. I was working for Bookham when Nortel nearly went bust last time, Bookham ended up effectively being handed Nortel's optics division on a plate.

The Nortel guy we took on as CFO almost caused a mutiny when he demanded that pay be frozen for the 3rd year running. He was warned that if the engineers didn't get a payrise they'd leave. The warning came true. Mind it was too late by then as the company moved to the US in order to use Chapter 11.

No longer exists now as it merged with another company and renamed itself.

I still have all the utterly worthless share options somewhere.

hopeful news; i don't think very highly of their ethernet and IP gear but the DMS central office switches and the Meridian PBX line are fine products. i'd much rather see an independent nortel concentrating on what they do well versus getting picked over by vultures. when i heard that siemens was looking at picking up the nortel enterprise communications business, all i was thinking about is what they ended up doing with rolm. what a waste.

I agree. The Norstar Meridian Mail voicemail system audio user interface is excellent - context sensitivity and has been around for years.

So much better than the crap I deal with now - e.g. "you have 1 new message...to record a message press 1, to record a greeting press 2, [oh and by the way] if you want hear your message press 3".

How about "you have 1 new message...to hear it press 2" - that's Meridian

Here's another crap voicemail system: "remember 1 for yes, 2 for no. you have 1 message, would you like to hear it?" then when you've heard it, you have to exit out of the multi-level deep menu system by pressing 2 for no about 4 times, otherwise if you hang up the system still says you have a new message.

Meridian voice mail is king!