Roth set up the Nortel melt down by misreading the optical market and overexpanding. The company has struggled to survive after he sold $325 million shares and bailed out. He should have been put in jail for his incompetent as well as fraudulent management.

The "telecom boom" has left many companies scarred and bloody. Whether Nortel can survive the spending plummet remains to be seen. Sadly, Nortel lost all opportunity to expand its tremendous strength in enterprise markets when it bought Bay Networks and did little to build upon the acquisition. Instead, few Bay leaders stayed to battle the politics that 100+ years of Canadian hegemony had bred. Cisco's market cap remains sizeable. Nortel's?

I'd have to agree with Nantucket Boat. Roth did an amazing job anticipating the importance of fiber and data (as opposed to copper and switches) in the new economy, and orchestrating what he called the "Right Angle Turn" - the transformation of an ancient phone equipment manufacturer to a networking powerhouse. As far as his inability to prepare Nortel for the collapse of tech spending - what could he have done? What do you do when macro economic factors cause companies to stop spending money on your products? I think you do what Roth has done - get lean as quick as you can, and try and ride out the storm.

Other than a $19 Billion write-off in 1 quarter...he's done a great job (yes there is sarcasm in this comment). Actually he took a sleepy 100 year-old company and turned it into the #1 telecommunications equipment vendor in the world. At one point Nortel's market-cap was Top 10, up there with the big boys (Microsoft, GE, etc.). Now, however, no one is laughing and Canada's retirees are nervous as we are in this "techy spending hiatus" with no end in sight in the short-term. Roth has done a great job, but he fell into the same trap as all of us with respect to the telecom boom, eh?