Nortel buys Diamondware

Last week, Nortel announced its $7million acquisition of Diamond Ware, to enhance its multimedia, voice conferencing and voice-over-Internet solutions portfolio. I found this to be a very promising acquisition which proves their persistence with their strategy to place their bets on some really emerging areas of unified communications.

There are a lot of critics of Nortel, many of them have written off the Great Canadian Telecommunications giant for the dead. I have not done enough analysis to have a strong opinion, but i do know a lot of people working at Nortel, and from my anecdotal conversations with them, i feel that there might be a spark of hope. Needless to say they all have their complaints about the new strategies, and many of them are still on the edge of their seat waiting for a pinkslip. But i have noticed that two of my contacts have moved from old Nortel products (optical, GPRS) to new groups such as IPTV and Project Chainsaw (web.alive) mentioned above. They seem to be putting their money where their mouth is, and that is encouraging. You can not expect a company with the years of excess malpractice to change overnight. Mike Z has a lot of cleaning up to do, and that isn't going to be immediate. It may not be immediate enough for shaky, unseasoned investors--but i see hope. I really got to give it to John Roese not only for his vision, but for his courage to leave sunny california to endure the Ottawa winters. He must really see something special in this company.

But getting back to the point of web.alive and the use of virtual 3D envionments to enhance the experience of the web, and particularly the use cases mentioned on e-commerce stores..... I honestly wonder whether or not we are ready to shop like that. But lets not forget the Milenials. This is their cup of tea after hours playing virtual 3D collaborative games with friends from around the world. This isn't the old Nintendo A + B cursor pads, that i grew up with. We are talking very advanced games and concepts that are ingrained in the milenial mindset. These are the guys that think that the 3D web is as intuitive and normal, as we feel booting up windows every morning. This is really for them.

With the baby boomers retiring in the hoards, the new workforce is going to be full of Milenials, and what do you think their barriers to adoption will be for a 3D Conferencing and Collaboration solution?

Hang in there Nortel--i think you are onto something.