back to article Old guard want to save Nortel

A consortium of old guard Nortel execs led by ex-CEO Bob Ferchat believe they can save Nortel, if only the Canadian government will help them out with a bit of funding - say about $1bn. Bob Ferchat is supported by other senior Nortel figures - including David Paterson, David Mann and Ian Craig. Ferchat is an ex-president of …

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  1. Alien8n
    Thumb Down

    No surprises there

    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.

  2. stc
    Go

    cool

    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.

  3. Olivier 1

    alteon is saved

    The great Alteons are kept alive by radware.

    If only they could bring the price of these wonders a bit lower..

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @stc

    One could argue that Ayava makes a better PBX and that ALU's 5ESS, while in some ways technically inferior, is a much better switch.

  5. YumDogfood

    Die! Die! Die!

    I wish we had a capitalist economy, not this old boys club semi-feudal statism. If you can't hack it you weren't good enough so just sod off and jump off a building or something. Greedy workshy feckers.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    @stc Norstar/Meridian PBXs best voicemail UI

    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!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who gets our money?

    In the grand scheme of things, I'd rather see the government prop up a struggling high-tech company with $1 billion, than hand $10.5 billion over to a struggling automaker.

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