[freshhawk]

I was also there as an intern around the same time.

It was an insane place to get my first "office job" experience. Entire buildings of hundreds of people all working on powerpoint reports about potential training ideas for future projects to improve the production of the powerpoint presentations made to summarize the reports on internal "sales" numbers that are then filed without anyone reading them because everyone knew they were too fudged to matter and the internal competition thing was a smokescreen for fraud anyway. Who was embezzling what this week were conversations coop students got to overhear.

I was there shortly before the whole thing collapsed and right before it did, in my department, there was a lot of boat shopping combined with clock watching as they waited for options to vest before the whole thing fell apart (everyone knew it would soon).

[chvid]

We killed our own telecommunications industry by first throwing it into a massive bubble and then starving the shit out of it.

It wasn't killed by spying Chinese communist; if anything it was killed by the flipside of our capitalist system. The "madness of crowds" that drives "hot" industries through periods of massive over-investment followed by massive under-investment.

[treeman79]

Sounds like it was badly miss managmed. Better companies outsold it, causing it to file bankruptcy.

This is one of the points of capitalism, Bad / wasteful decisions lead to failure. Better managed companies rise. Consumers get better products cheaper.