Fascinating to see how much is 'inspired' by Apple's design and Microsoft's for the document app. I'd feel dirty in so blatantly copying someone else's design, but Huawei doesn't share those concerns. Maybe for good reason.
So as a customer why would I trust any company with my most personal health, banking or own intellectual property if that company sees no reasonable limitations to its behaviour in any other sphere?
The original purpose for branding was to allow customers to identify food products they could trust. The same is true for technology.
Thanks for this insight
I don't personally trust Huawei to behave responsibly. But I don't really trust any other company either. Android is basically a Google anti-privacy play.
Western IP law is arguably just a tool to delay Chinese progress (speaking from an international perspective). A Chinese company ignoring it doesn't really tell us much about how the company will behave towards its customers.
Nope. Android is a mobile OS and is pretty well done versus the many other oses it replaced.
> Western IP law is arguably just a tool to delay Chinese progress (speaking from an international perspective)
I'm pretty sure IP law wasn't created to "slow down Chinese progress". It is there to provide an incentive for invention and creativity. The whole point is to grant a limited time where an inventor can profit with minimal competition so it slows everyone's progress. But to say IP law targets China is at best mistaken.
In order for developing countries to develop, they have to jump out this loop. With the exponential development of technology, the absolute gap between developing world and developed world will be so huge that they will never have a chance of reaching the same level.
Note that despite the argument that IP law promotes invention and creativity Huawei is a world leading tech innovator in 4G. Despite obviously having little respect for IP law. They'll probably discover the importance of IP law now that they have taken the lead but it IP law appears to have been more of a hindrance in getting the innovation started.
Yes, that is the whole point. IP gives an inventor a reward in the form of limited or no competition for a period of time.
> it doesn't tell us how a Chinese company will treat their customers.
This is like saying your wearing the wrong running shoes to swim five miles.
It is easy to see how a company could believe that and also believe in treating their customers well. It would be a very competitive company.
> This is like saying your wearing the wrong running shoes to swim five miles.
I don't follow your point but I agree would be foolish to wear running shoes while swimming.
That's uncharitable. Android effectively started as a pro-web play: a way to ensure Google could deliver their services to mobile users regardless of what mobile manufacturers wanted (we're talking Nokia and Blackberry, which dominated the sector at the time and, together with phone carriers, could dictate what would or would not get to phones). They later got greedy with data-siphoning, but Apple effectively does the same, they're just a bit shy about over-exploiting it.
Perhaps it's time we recognised ideas and concepts are meant to be taken up and extended by other people? That's how humans have progressed these thousands of years. Not by paranoid, corporate silos and NIH syndrome and draconian patents.
I don't think the comparison holds at all: Yoga is something people do in many different ways, not a specific product, nor is 'the western world' a single entity. When I do Yoga I am not selling my attempt at whatever 'real' yoga is for profit.
This comparison might have made sense, mind you, not much, if I had said that other companies should feel dirty for making tablets after the first one was made.
> Perhaps it's time we recognised ideas and concepts are meant to be taken up and extended by other people?
I agree with this and is a bit stating the obvious. This is, as you say, basically how mankind works.
To be clear I don't think Huawei should be prevented from doing this, I just think it is unauthentic which I don't like. It is purely an expression of my dislike of what they've created not a call to action for some team of lawyers.
https://sciencebusiness.net/news/72228/The-story-of-the-basm...
Because, either no one can clone and customise, or - god forbid - everyone can.
[Oddly its the latter idea that seems to bother many people, even though its clearly and objectively less prejudicial].
It's not perfect, but i don't think there's a better way. Corporate silos is exactly what it's trying to fix.
If someone patented the Decimal System or Abacus or Gun powder or Pythogorus Theorem or Fibonnaci Series or Newton patented its laws of motion and anyone using this laws and formula's in any system needs to pay royalty not sure what weird world will be.
Human knowledge stand on the giant shoulders of others and patent and copyright with ever-greening and useless litigation are making it hard and difficult. Can't fathom someone can copyright a rectangle drawing and sue phone companies for launching rectangle phones.
How is this even an argument, given that patents expire?
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/patent-system-often-stifle...
These days, many patented technologies expire faster than patents on them. In those cases, patents are quite literally halting progress.
Technological progress isn't a line, it's a graph. Someone patents an invention and decides to sit on it, and by the time the patent expires, the entire technological environment has shifted around in a way which makes that invention worthless, and follow-up work unlikely to happen. Whereas, were it not for that patent, the invention would had people extending it further, perhaps generating even more immediately useful technologies.
In this way, a patent - in particular, a defensive patent, taken to prevent anyone from developing a technology that endangers your business - is closing off avenues of progress.
If Huawei is copying they will always lag behind. Still, are they really copying? or are they piecing innovations together into a new improved product?
Give them a break and a chance to bring something new - sanctions and all, it is pretty impressive they have persevered.
I think the cause-effect here is reversed. They are copying because they're behind, in this particular area. No doubt they're vigorously defending their own IP in 5G.
Companies, countries, individual race car drivers all slipstream when they're behind. It's a matter pragmatism and economics, not of morality and principles. Recall that Steve Jobs considered Android itself "a stolen product".
Why is Xiaomi in second place now in Europe? Because their phones are cheap. They are the IKEA of smartphones.
Steve Jobs is dead. Apple is returning to the mean.
Bezos is out. Amazon is returning to the mean.
Google founders are out at Google. Google is returning to the mean.