You make it sound like the western companies had no choice in the matter. I don't think anybody has ever forced a western company to move its production in China. Actually these western companies are making a lot of money by moving to China. And I think apart from industrial espionage , the rules were clear upfront.
That's not the actual history of these types of of actions. Look at the 1982 IBM / Japan theft case (https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/09/business/hitachi-guilty-i...).
IBM was aggressively protecting its mainframe market in the 80s so it would have a blossoming and prosperous future.
Even if we are to accept your premise AND all your arguments, it's still a bad idea as it actually led to a stagnation of technology.
There's plenty more historical examples of this. It doesn't work.
Take the Japanese automobile quota system for example (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/am...). This tried to protect encroachment of Japanese cars into the American market.
Not by increasing the quality but by suspecting the Japanese of stealing American know-how. A covetous and revanchist policy.
This only led to them internationalizing their markets more and working around the US in their supply chain. The US locked itself out of the market, became insular with its cars, stagnated and lost its place in the international market.
And now everyone is doing lean manufacturing which is from Toyota. Turns out they were just making better stuff and our policymakers were too racist to acknowledge the possibilities just like we thought Afghanistan was going to be easy, or Russia thought they'd easily defeat Japan.
The haughty racial superiority complex is alive and well.
1. Implying the downfall of mainframes was due to protectionist policies and not the _PC_ is an incredible leap.
2. Comparing Japan to China in this situation is bizarre.
3. Your reply does nothing to show that this situation is:
* cartoonish
* racist
* utterly foolish protectionism
We know today that Huawei has a history of IP Theft from American multinationals[1] and is suspected of building backdoors into networking infrastructure (from the article). You seem to advocate that the US should just take this lying down. This is a classic prisoners dilemma situation, and Huawei has been choosing "betray" for 20 years. I can't see, how after 20 years of playing nice, that the US response is cartoonish, racist or foolish protectionism.
[1] https://www.prosperousamerica.org/top_five_cases_of_huawei_i...
The PDF link describing details about the 1st one was broken, but it sounds like a standard case of employees leaving a company to work for a competitor (allowed under California law) and the old company going sour grapes.
Didn't bother reading 4 and 5, after how overblown 2 and 3 were.
On a separate note, I think the biggest most obvious question that any accuser has to answer is, if Huawei copied so much significant material, why are they ahead of everyone else? It takes time to digest copied technology, it is not a simple case of just copying your competitor's source code then racing ahead of them with a massive sales team and non-technical economic prowess. Given that intellectual property laws were constructed to (supposedly) encourage innovation, even if Huawei did get to where they are now by copying, doesn't that suggest that in fact it's a good thing, they have brought all this extra innovative technology to the world? Or are the monopolists simply going sour grapes because they are no longer at the the forefront?
It's wikipedia man - that section alone has 8 cited sources. Healthy skepticism is a good thing, but I'm not going to spoonfeed you.
>it is not a simple case of just copying your competitor's source code then racing ahead of them with a massive sales team and non-technical economic prowess
But this is exactly what happened in Huawei's case. Huawei is known for being cheaper than Cisco and providing way better support than Cisco. It's easy to throw bodies at sales & support when you don't pay R&D. They aren't even ahead of everyone else - Cisco's hardware is still more performant and Ericsson is still more widely deployed. 5G simply provided a new ground where everyone would start from 0.
I don't know why you are being downvoted but your questions don't seem relevant. What does it matter that monopolists are going sour grapes? If I steal from you, and use that money to buy a fancy car, and get thrown in jail, will any lawyer use the defense "infinity0 was jealous of my fancy car"?
When your officer mentions "strcmp" on a public blog post, as one of their key examples of "theft", that is extremely telling.
> But this is exactly what happened in Huawei's case. [..] providing way better support than Cisco [..] They aren't even ahead of everyone else
Providing better support is not helped by copying technology, but you have to train large numbers of non-technical support staff to be competent at supporting that particular technology. Sure "ahead" depends on your measure, but they are certainly ahead in some key areas such as coverage.
> If I steal from you, and use that money to buy a fancy car
Stealing money is different from copying technology. If I steal your money, you no longer have the money. But if I copy your technology, you still have the technology. By the time it takes me to understand your technology, you have had enough time to innovate further upon it. So attributing Huawei's success primarily to this, is extremely biased. Given than there have been much more substantial lawsuits with widely-covered technical evidence (Apple vs Samsung, Google vs Oracle) as well as heavier fines involved, I cannot put any strong belief in these Huawei accusations. Huawei being singled out for something less substantive than what other companies have already done, this stinks of some sort of prejudice, and anyone reasonable can see this. If it's not racism, it is ideological - that a company from a country run on an entirely different set of principles, is doing as good or better than you.
Seagate also had some 80s theft but instead they chose to focus on their next technologies and making better products. "They can't steal our quality" is the quote I remember.
Corporate espionage happens a lot. I've had it happen to me, at companies I've been involved in, multiple times. Of course we are supposed to ignore how common it is and focus on China and then assume everyone else are honest moral angels getting hoodwinked. Nonsense.
The accusations are framed as if because something is Chinese we cannot trust it. There's suspicions, hunches, and feelings. You even used "suspected". As if "well we can't trust those shifty Asians". This will get us nowhere. Build better stuff.
Also you can't down vote replies, but thanks anyway. Your nonsense is entertaining
I said essentially the same things here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101407 which was outside their thread of interest so it didn't go in the deep negatives. Same message, different parent, radically different results.
So it's not good faith, it's some dumb bad faith psychological game. It's an Ash conformity test. I'm supposed to think "hrmm, maybe 'Chinaman is evil' race-baiting IS correct, look at all the people who think that!" Nope. Not happening. I know the scam.
I know I'm not the crazy one, there's groups of racist internet lunatics that go around and do attacks like this ... that's why I dropped it. They can have their fun. I have other things to do with my time, but I'm retracting absolutely nothing. They can try to move that overton window somewhere else.
I don't understand the point you are trying to make. I mean, the PC killed the mainframe because it was a superior concept, because it catered to an incomparably larger market (personal computing) and, due to its massive economies of scale allowed to develop solutions that ate away the mainframe market.
I mean, think about it: why so you think a massively successful company like Google, with very deep pockets and total freedom to pick and choose the best technology money can buy, decided to found their whole business not on mainframes but on massive clusters of COTS PCs? And why do you think Google doubled-down on PCs, and not on mainframes, even after they started to design and build and operate their own computers?
> The accusations are framed as if because something is Chinese we cannot trust it.
China's regime can't be trusted because it has a very long track record of fraud and abuse and deceitfulness, not to mention human rights violations. You'd be hard-pressed to find any nation that developed a trusting relationship with China due to the way China's totalitarian regime engages with the whole world, specially their neighbors.
Because in the early 80s and late 70s, IBM, Honeywell, CDC, Unisys, Burroughs, nobody focused on the right things.
That's why it's a counterfactual. Virtual machine first started on VM by IBM and then on VM/ESA. The parallel multi core processor was also a mainframe innovation.
If in a different world where they ran it like a brutal startup instead of a post ww2 government contractor relying on legislation to secure profits, the past 40 years could have played out differently.
Just like CP/M could have been on the IBM PC if Digital Research returned the phone calls faster or we could all be running Xerox desktops today if they had dealt with Parc differently or we'd all be in a post nuclear apocalypse if the people in charge of launching them didn't defy orders.
Please stop assuming I'm profoundly incompetent, this is counterproductive