Mark Evans wrote a thought provoking article on the "Americanization" of Nortel and then posted the story in his blog.  It is the story that gets your thinking going (that is what makes an article great, no matter what your viewpoint happens to be - as long as you can get together with some friends for a beer and have a discussion about the material, the article's mission is accomplished).

So I felt compelled to get on my soapbox and write a quick comment, but that got me thinking a bit more.  Mark might have a valid point about of the loss of Nortel's Canadian entity, but I believe that the major "Canadian content" loss happened way before, when the ownership of the company changed.  When Jean Monty sold the controlling share that Bell Canada had of NT stock, Nortel certainly lost a bit of that identity.  There is still the Bell Canada/Nortel joint research center in Ottawa, but you do not hear so much about BNR anymore (the lab I worked at here in Toronto used to be BNR but it no longer exists).  However, that was not really the "fault" of the Nortel executives, or the board, etc.  It was just a process - Monty astutely cashed in the BCE NT chips (near the height of the stock), although what he did with the proceeds of that sale might be open to another debate altogether. 

But the point is that the Bell Canada sale of Nortel's stock definitely marked a loss of the company's Canadian identity (for one thing, obviously the shares changed hands and perhaps the foreign ownership percentage of the stock went up).  Bottom line is that this will probably continue to happen, although not quite as much.  I am talking about the change in RRSP foreign content rules, which might lead some Canadian investment houses to slowly start moderately divesting from their Canadian stocks (that had to make up 70% of their fund portfolios in order for the fund to be considered domestic).  This might lead to more of NT stock going to American hands.

As far as R&D goes, yes, it is true that Nortel already had centers in Mission Park (CA), Richardson (TX) and Raleigh/Research Triangle Park (NC) for a long time.  But that makes sense, given the fact that a lot of the telecom action in North America happens to be in the US (which has far more enterprises and big telcos - Verizon, SBC, Bell South and Qwest).  But I expect Nortel to still continue having its own R&D centers in Canada, as Canadian engineers still represent better bang-for-the-buck than their American counterparts (which are more expensive).  So I do not foresee a JDS-like massive migration to the US for Nortel.  On a separate note, from all the foreign telecom vendors that have Canadian representation, only Ericsson has a Canadian R&D center (a lab in Montreal).  That is interesting, considering how many talented people we have - perhaps Ottawa should consider offering more incentives to strengthen our own Silicon Valley (in Ottawa).

After reading a bunch of Om Malik's posts on his huge storage arsenal, I decided to learn a bit more about storage technologies, and after a bit of surfing, I came across a great tutorial about Hitachi's perpendicular recording state-of-the-art technology.  The Global Storage Technologies unit of the Japanese vendor has achieved a breakthrough, attaining an areal density of 230 Gbits / square inch, relying on its perpendicular recording technology (this is quite a feat - almost double of what can be done today with longitudinal recording).  This will lead to a product in 2007 having up to 20 GB on Hitachi's one-inch Microdrive.  But what really impressed me about the site is the excellent level of technical detail and how the company clearly explains the technology.  The creative tutorial in particular stands out as one of the premier examples of how to market complex technology - the animation is simply a brilliant way to convey the point.