Nortel Executives Found Not Guilty On Fraud Charges 151
Following up on the earlier story about Nortel execs waiting for a ruling in their corporate fraud case, new submitter Unknown1337 writes "Something doesn't add up when a multi-billion dollar corporation loses it's value so quickly, but the courts have decided it wasn't intentional fraud by the executives that caused it."
Malice (Score:5, Interesting)
"Do not attribute to malice, what can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Still, this does not pass the smell test..
Re:Nortel: victim of industrial espionage? (Score:2, Interesting)
I was an employee of Nortel, and I do not buy this completely. It might have happened - for sure, but Nortel was so slow that even otherwise, its demise was on the cards. Once I was part of a big project - which was supposed to be 50+ people for 9 months - which in the end ballooned to 150+ people and was not over even after 2 years. Not that these sort of overruns doesnt happen in other companies - but the project itself was to implement one existing specification in their system 2 years after all their competitors. Also, the whole thing shouldnt have taken 9 months and 50+ people itself, but their language and architecture was so old that it was very non-agile and we could straightaway see it struggling with its monolithic architecture against the COTS system provided by the competitors.
For me, Nortel failed because they (1) did not innovate enough in the later years and (2) their software architecture did not move with the times. Other factors like espionage might have been a major cause, but they were still struggling a lot otherwise also.
Please note that I was a small time developer in one area, so in other areas they might have been much better. But our area was one of their lucrative ones though - so cant say either ways.
Re:Malice (Score:2, Interesting)
While no super genius he didn't sound that dumb when he thought the microphone was off:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bush_and_Blair_conversation [wikisource.org]
And he's smarter than the average US voter since he got voted in for a second term.