What will Nortel's leading technology area be in, say, five years? It's tough to predict five years in the future. But I'm going to spend a lot of my time to make sure it happens that we lead in the enterprise infrastructure business. The enterprise market is desperately looking for an alternative to Cisco. They really want someone to step up with scale, brand and technology solutions. And when I look around, the only candidate is Nortel. The market needs someone to go head-to-head with Cisco. Nortel may be one half the $12 billion in enterprise revenues of Cisco, but what I believe from talking to enterprise customers is that if anyone with scale, brand and technology starts to behave like an alternative to Cisco, there will be a relative shift because the market is out of balance.

Since you mention Cisco, what's your reaction to Cisco CEO John Chambers recent comments that Cisco needs to consider charging separately for software embedded in hardware and that it probably doesn't charge enough for software? That comment is a great symptom of Cisco functioning as a provider of pipes. They don't seem to have an economic model around software in their application and connectivity business. Cisco's genesis has always been as a purveyor of pipes. In the customer mind-set, the least significant part is probably the pipe. It's providing network capacity in a secure and useful way that's important to the customer.

OK, I hear what you are saying about how Nortel's existing customers like Nortel, even love Nortel. But what do you say to the New York-based customer I met who has thousands of users on Avaya Inc. phones and is considering alternative vendors, since Avaya may triple his software prices? He said he's considering Cisco and Alcatel, but would not touch Nortel because of the taint of financial restatements in recent years by Nortel. Well, shame on us for not engaging him appropriately. I wonder if he has the right information about our company. If on the first time a person hears from a salesperson about Nortel and if that customer's only experience is a negative public impression, it's tough to sell him.

The doors inside the installed Nortel base are definitely open. How we will generate growth is from competitive displacement. To get pull in the market won't necessarily come from the creation of new products. It's from shifting Nortel from an inward focus toward creating noise about the good things going on. The negative press about financial restatements or executive replacements are countered by talking about who uses Nortel. That has not been done.