Everywhere I go I see folk using their smart phones to take pictures and to text and even, sometimes, to talk. These new tools seem to be ubiquitous.
As a Londoner, I see something else. I see a technology that slipped from our grasp. At one time, London was home to a massive Nortel plant. It made telephones, and not just for Canada but for the world. When I was in Tunisia back in the 1990s, I saw a Northern Telecom building outside Tunis on the way to Sidi Bou Said.
Nortel was such a powerhouse of a telecommunications giant that at one point more than a quarter of the value of the Toronto Stock Exchange was claimed by Nortel.
But that was then. Today the plant is gone. The company almost forgotten. Telephones and most state-of-the-art telecommunications equipment are now made offshore. About the strongest lasting memory of the once giant company are the ones held by the workers who found themselves without jobs and without the pensions they had been promised.
Giants can be very disappointing.
2 comments:
That is a sad reality. So many once great companies let others pass them by and shrivel and die. Just a few are able to transform themselves into still valuable competitors. Sad for workers who had relied on them for work and income after their work days finished.
Nortel was big here too. I don't know how much of a presence they still have.
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