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Comment by throwaway902375 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve talked to a fair share of insiders myself and general consensus is that the hardware basically sells itself, and customers approach the software stack as something they’re unfortunately stuck with.

ASML developed new software products over the years but it didn’t pan out and at this point customers are wary of anything being sold and would rather keep 20 year old inefficient but proven to work systems around. Think racks of control systems next to DUV machines that are officially years EOL but ASML is forced to sell today because it’s all a customer is willing to buy into.

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I have 0 idea about the new software they failed to make, but let me guess:

-- Machine has to be connected to internet at all times for no functional reason whatsoever

-- Account has to be created for every employee to login to "cloud"

-- Software had "smart" in the name

-- Monthly subscription, the more accounts the higher the cost

-- Completely bugged and broken web interface at all times. Make sure the style and behavior of UX components is unlike anything else and broken.

-- Hosted through Azure with the most elaborate and complex infrastructure setup possible. At least 100 mb upload per served webpage and 1 GB of RAM useage at the client side.

-- Machine serves the website/API from the smallest possible microcontroller for no reason.

-- Webapp / client runs in Microsoft Edge only.

-- Tracking sent to ASML servers for "no reason"

-- Everybody at ASML working on the cloud software had to work on-site in Eindhoven for no reason whatsoever and was paid as little as possible by forming renumeration fixing cartels with other companies in the area.

I hope that I'm completely wrong.

Most customer fabs run airgapped because they contain some of the most valuable IP on the planet. So pretty much none of the above applies.

It’s mostly legacy hardware and code combined with ASML support contracts. ASML support is provided on-request remote access to the systems, or someone flies out if the customer is particularly paranoid.

ASML would kill for any tracking or diagnostics to be regularly send back to Eindhoven for R&D purposes, but it mostly doesn’t happen because machine diagnostics data is intertwined with the chip IP.

As Throwaway stated all fabs are offline. The office portions are online but moving data in and out of the fab is pure sneaker net.

You realize how much of a complete joke airport security is once you have gone through the security gauntlet to get into a fab.

Getting a laptop into the complex is a difficult. USB drives, cell phones, etc. are carefully controlled. Making a direct connection to a tool in the fab with anything is a major PITA.

and they can still get viruses and its a shit show. Fortunately most of the stuff runs on not windows or incredibly out of date versios of windows (3.1?)

You forget ASML is a European company

LOL.

Very likely explanation, reminds me of the abomination that is the software stack of Xilinx.

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