3 ms·
> It looks like saving a billion dollars in redundant work, which is a net societal gain. Now consumers have two companies to choose chips from instead of one f
by RHSeeger 5y ago
> It looks like saving a billion dollars in redundant work, which is a net societal gain. Now consumers have two companies to choose chips from instead of one functional monopoly due to a trade secret moat... Win for consumers. ;)
But looking at it from the company point of view.
- Company A spends 5 billion $ researching a new fab, from which better chips can be made.
- Company A expects to sell those chips as <cost> + <margin> + <an amount extra to pay off the 5 billion that was spent>
- Company B steals the plans for the fab
- Company B sells the chips for <cost> + <margin>
At this point, it is impossible for Company A to recoup the money they spent researching the technology, because people will buy from Company B if it costs less from them. That's a pretty huge loss.
- kragen 5y agoFor Company A it's a loss, for Company B it's a gain, and for the world it's a gain, because now there are more of those better chips than there would have been. The problem is that if Company A expects this to happen, they may not spend the US$5 billion in the first place, which is an even bigger loss for the world.
- echelon 5y agoNortel comes to mind. Think about all the highly paid engineers that lost their jobs. An entire domestic sector wiped out.
- kragen 5y agoNortel was sunk by mismanagement before the espionage episode, not by the espionage itself. Quite possibly a lot of Nortel's technology would have been lost in the confusion of bankruptcy if the spies hadn't saved it.
- echelon 5y agoDo you have any info or reading on this? I tried to Google "nortel mismanagement", but it's unclear any of the sources put it in light of the espionage.
- kragen 5y agoThere are some comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114607, but I admit I haven't verified them. I'm interested to hear what you end up concluding if you do dig into the sources.