From a buyer's point of view, Bay was the most attractive enterprise data vendor to buy. At the time Bay's market valuation was just a tenth of Cisco's, yet Bay was No. 2 in supplying IP routers and a leader in LAN hubs and switches for corporate networks.

When the carrier bubble burst in 2000, the carrier market for IP and Ethernet cooled, and the hot market again became corporations. Bay might have done well independently then, he says. And if Nortel had shifted its focus to enterprise gear then it might have done better as well.

Today's Nortel enterprise data group might do very well outside the Nortel culture, which compared to the fast-moving world of enterprise gear was slow to move, House says. When he was there between 1998 and 1999, he noted a big difference between the business culture he had created at Bay and the one he worked in at Intel.

Decisions at Nortel were made meticulously and carefully and written out and voted on unanimously to avoid shortcomings that regulators could jump on. Internal debate wasn't free-flowing, he says.

At Intel, the culture nurtured straight talk, public debate, making a decision and getting everyone on board to back it. Nortel's culture was different, perhaps because it had a 100-year history of dealing with regulated phone companies as customers.During his tenure as president of Nortel, House says the sales forces of Bay and Nortel were merged but the Bay gear never got the support it should have with the worldwide sales team.

House signed on for one year at Nortel and worked out of the office of then Nortel CEO John Roth. "Everyone reported to the two of us," he says, and the marching orders were to make Nortel more like Bay in the way it was run. But when it came to implement such a strategy, doing so from the No. 2 position was difficult. "You'd tell someone to do something and you could see them looking behind you to see what John thought."

Nortel had a culture of lifers, people hired out of college who expected to spend their careers there. That made employees compete against each other for promotion rather than against competitors, he says.

He also had to confer with Roth to hire, fire, promote and change salaries, all of which were cumbersome and undermined his authority.

"I don't have a lot of information on what happened after I left," says House, who is now chairman of Brocade. "That was in 1999 and I haven't been in touch with those people on a professional level since then.