Agree- seems from the outside, armchair QB point of view that they were still following old business models.
If you already have products that do everything another system does, do you really need to buy it? Furthermore, do you really need to buy it, everything around it, the boxes it all came in and the truck it arrived on?
There was a reason Nortel was going under. Buying Nortel, especially lock, stock and barrel, looks like a poor decision. It may have just been old telecom reverence for the iconic Nortel name.
I'n not a fortune 500 CEO, but it looks like either targeted "cherry picking" Nortel purchases would have been better. Better still, buy rights to make & sell tightly integrated systems under your own brand (Nortel was circling the drain- they would have sold). Then you can market to Nortel customers with your own known and stable architecture, offering them "updated, enhanced and stabilized" systems.
