Yuck. I suppose bankruptcies are supposed to be ugly since so much dirty laundry is available for all to see, probably too much dirty laundry. A report in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports that Nortel may be close to selling Enterprise as a standalone unit to either Siemens Enterprise or Avaya, both of which are privately held by equity firms, and that Nortel may be close to selling Wireless to Nokia-Siemens Networks which has poor North American marketshare. I've certainly heard this before, but am sad to note that Mike Z has demonstrated zero credibility at being able to support these kinds of creative solutions to the current market conditions. (See my blog post, Now is the Time For… ) How many times were M&A supposedly considered by Mike Z before today? Dozens. Remember that Wall Street Journal feature on Mike Z ? Double Yuck.
Of course, every reasonable competitor (and probably a few others) has to walk through the motions of checking out the business with the hopes of finding something they can use as a competitor, or use as a buyer. Enterprise and Wireless have only been divisions before, so the publicly available information has been a little weak.
{shadowboxwtw2}A friend of mine (and stiffed-pensioner) said that "he would have run Nortel to exactly the same point of loss for HALF the money."{/shadowboxwtw2} Frankly, like most former shareholders, I've been disappointed with Mike Z's lack of decisive leadership. He may be a brilliant GE-trained operational executive, but his visionary, presentation and persuasive skills are quite weak (login required) as demonstrated by his winning of an anti-award from us.
Shame on the Board of Directors. Shame on Mike Z. It's a sad day for the communications innovation industry.
