Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Tuesday 20 November 2007, 1:46 AM
One flight later...
Other comparisons are easy to make, difficult to analyse. Cisco has famously grown by acquisition, having bought well over a hundred companies in its lifetime, while Huawei has a similar appetite for joint ventures; Sun, Motorola, Vodafone and many others are in the mix. Cisco is a publicly listed company, Huawei isn't – which has led to a lot of grumbling when, for example, it and a bunch of private equity types decided to buy 3Com – another partner -- recently.
Ah yes, the grumblings. Huawei is a lot more aggressive and outward looking than most Chinese technology companies: consultancy Interbrand places it seventh in a list of internationally recognised Chinese brands, unprecedented for a company that specialises in selling stuff to other companies, because its “strong culture pushes every employee to the extreme”. (Interbrand also designed Huawei's chrysanthemum-themed logo, so may be excused for being nice).
Such visibility, combined with the opacity of its financing and general Western apprehension about Chinese economic expansion, means that there's no shortage of stories out there. Industrial espionage (Huawei famously cloned a huge chunk of Cisco's product range, leading to a lockhorn of lawyers and an out-of-court agreement), extreme management style (the company recently decided to make 7000 of its long-term employees to 'voluntarily resign' and reapply for their jobs, apparently in reaction to a change in Chinese labour laws that would otherwise have granted them more rights) and overt friendliness with the military and state (Huawei was started by an ex-People's Liberation Army man) have all been raised as reasons why things just ain't right with the lad.
You can alternatively see all this as good old-fashioned reverse engineering – is it really industrial espionage to take the top off a competitor's product and work out what's inside?, efforts at employee motivation (Huawei said that the 7000 would get lots of benefits in return), and just the way things work in China. The PLA, after all, has a huge economic role in Chinese business – and if you look at Israel's technology sector by comparison, it's symbiotic with the Israeli Defense Forces root and branch.
China enjoys and exploits ambiguity. Makes my job fun.
Meanwhile, let's not lose sight of the fact that Huawei makes things. It is particularly keen on wireless, with fingers in more pies than Sweeny Todd, and works actively in new standards like LTE (the Long Term Evolution of 3G) as well as... well, everything else. Its list of interests reads like line noise: HSDPA/WCDMA/EDGE/ GPRS/GSM, CDMA2000 1xEV-DO/CDMA2000 1X, TD-SCDMA, WiMAX, IM, NGN, FTTx, xDSL, IN, BOSS, UMTS/CDMA, says the company website. Around half of its staff work in R&D, and it has labs everywhere you expect.
Which leads to thoughts about how much Huawei invents for itself, how much it generates in conjunction with its partners, and whether it's capable of creating a genuine lead in new technology that others will have to follow. And how much difference the answers to those questions will make to the company's future success.
As Groklaw's PJ says: let's find out together.
PreviousComments on this post
Taking the lid off a competitor's box and looking inside is one thing -- X-raying the circuit board and making an identical copy of the hardware and then selling it as your own is something else entirely...
Oh, I'm not saying it's not a bad thing to do. There was a similar case that came to light last year, which was even more embarrassing, but I don't think anyone said that industrial espionage was involved. (They might, but I haven't read that.)
I am saying it's wrong, but that it's not espionage. Espionage means finding information that's secret - and it's hard to argue that the design of a freely available product contains secrets. That's why we have information property laws, which recognise that publishing something removes secrecy and attempt to provide other ways to protect the work within.
From another angle, how is X-raying a PCB or etching away a chip package different in principle from taking a screwdriver and opening a case - or even to reading a service manual? Industrial espionage, to me, means taking steps to find information that is not inherently contained in the structure of something you legitimately own.
There are, of course, lots of grey areas - and that's precisely why I think the choice of the word espionage, without a lot of serious back-up, is wrong. It carries many emotive and practical implications, and anyone using it where reverse engineering may be more appropriate is open to accusations of rhetoric - precisely what you don't want when you're trying to get to the bottom of what actually happened.
You can find many similar examples in the arguments about abortion, copyright, and terrorism. If you want to be accurate in your use of words, abortion isn't murder, breaking copyright laws is neither piracy nor theft, and holding up a placard objecting to your government is not terror-inducing.
You may fervently believe otherwise, and you're free to make your case that such things are equivalent in import, but that does not make them the same. Using language that bluntly states otherwise is propaganda, and raises legitimate question as to why those words were chosen above other, more accurate ones.
