Far more likely, there's no shortage of other reasons that led to its downfall, but it's easier for the people responsible to blame spies.
Nortel without the IP theft was certainly on shaky ground.
It sounds like the IP gave Huawei an opportunity to catch up more quickly and with Chinese govt cash, pull the rug out from under Nortel.
I'll take this with a grain of salt. To this day Bloomberg still stands by its "The Big Hack" article (Supermicro, Amazon, and Apple being hacked with the tiny Chinese chip), containing claims that have been thoroughly refuted (and ridiculed) since then, and about which even their own sources were very incredulous. The CEO of Apple called it "100 percent a lie", which is a very harsh word in this context. Those were lower standards than the ones we're held to when commenting here on HN.
I don't know how that article came to be but such precedent puts their tech articles into serious question. Obviously such articles about major Chinese interference and hacks are great with the readers and get a lot of attention. But while the premise may be true (the Chinese hack most likely happened), the implications and the interpretation of the reporter are on shaky ground.
I don't have any further evidence but I'd say that Bloomberg may be pandering to the readers and giving them what they want to hear during these times. And if I were Bloomberg reporters Jordan Robertson or Michael Riley I'd say that even if my sources denied it.
It's a little hand-wavy I'll admit. The article makes accusations that they don't back up very well.
That said, I thought it was a decent attempt to be somewhat balanced.
I worked with lots of the big vendors over the years (I worked at a telcecom operator here in Canada), and you'd get to chatting and they were all under financial pressure internally, lots of layoffs. One time I was visiting one of the big vendors in the US, and our team was joking around how it felt like we were visiting a retirement home, it was like there was no one under 50 in the building (this was mid 2010's). Beers with other vendors, and they'd be talking about how there's an entire floor for like 5 employees and more layoffs coming down.
Because the company survived... doesn't mean it's alive and well.
And in my case it doesn't apply, the equipment we're evaluating was all software, running on a common x86 telecom platform. While I'm sure the office did have some embedded R&D, alot of what telecom vendors do just requires software developers.
As someone who lived it (being younger than young and older than most), the whole notion of young hardware (or software) engineers being somehow “better” stems from (IMNSHO) two factors: 1) their naivety in being willing to sacrifice personal life so they can be more “productive,” often at a lower cost of labor —-if you call that type of output “product” because: 2) tech had progressed slowly from the 1940s to the 1980s when micro-electronics began to democratize and challenge the established players making the financial benefits of (non-wartime) warp-speed innovation clear for the first time in history (previously, it was taught that the risks of fast innovation far exceeded any benefit), but highly skilled workers (101% of workforce) were slow to want to deviate from their established work paradigms or risk their mortgage on a dicey startup job even with VC backing. First Steve (Jobs), then Bill (Gates) began to have luck pairing these workers with, then managing them with and ultimately replacing them with kids that had way more talent than experience (a mistake that Steve did not repeat after the “classic” MacOS disaster and being fired —and that Bill “outgrew”).
I could go on for hours about this, but what you are seeing today (an industry filled with mostly young people) is not a result of “under 50” workers (as you put it) being better, indeed it is a market aberration (that you may not be able to realize from your perspective in The Matrix) that arose by the rank-in-file being forced out during the dot-com crash in 2000 and new college grads not commencing for more than half a decade later. Watching the industry (slowly) “come back” with future pear-shaped gurus has been one of the great satisfactions in my long career. (Who needs Star Trek timewarp plots?)
PS: BTW, I have over 40 years of experience and am not eligible for the senior menu at IHOP anytime soon —though being GenX, I am also holding a reference to a Promise that, by the time I get to that age, they will have changed the qualifying age! -and yeah, the older presenters at WWDC mostly creeped me out too —though it may just be that they are required to stay healthy and not pear-shaped by the AppleWatch team.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rank%20and%20file
I am not sure why this trend didn't translate towards hardware but if I were to guess - the jobs are fewer, the barriers of entry are higher (no one really teaches hardware design in school) and the cost of mistakes is bigger.
VISA is an example of that. Reputation-based businesses (Think auditing firms) are another. Facebook is a third.
On the other hand, a vendor like Nortell did not have network lockin on their customers. They could, and did end up switching vendors.