@bigtoke lol, the 2nd article is really reaching there-why should companies have to be publicly listed?!? I actually think that being publicly listed for growth/funding is one of the worst aspects of western economies, since it puts an insanely heavy focus on short term profits over long term success. If you don't meet some completely arbitrary quarterly target that random Wall Street analysts set, your stock price tanks and then the board is forced to fire you because they have to "represent the shareholders' interests." even though they clearly just care about the short term. This is how Steve Jobs got fired from Apple when their earnings weren't doing so well, the reason why some really terrible CEOs get huge paydays just because the economy carries their companies along (see entire GM executive team throughout the 90's and 2000's until bankruptcy), etc. Decide to make huge gas-hogging SUVs that returned a lot of short term profits? Huge paydays and contracts that meant that they kept getting huge paydays even when things went south. Have a long term vision for your computer company that leads to some slow short term growth? You're fired. I'm not even a big Steve Jobs fan but it's just one of the many, many, examples where publicly traded companies behave as if the only thing that matters is the next quarter or the next year. There are plenty of very successfully run private companies that I respect a heck of a lot more than their publicly listed competitors. Wegmans is a supermarket chain that consistently shows up at the top of the "best places to work for" list that Fortune runs, and they're privately held (and yes, this is the supermarket whose store brand stuff you keep seeing on The Office). Being privately held meant that when the economy tanked with the recent stock market crash, they cut prices very, very, aggressively. A publicly held company would have been given like 100 lashes by their shareholders for gutting profit margins. A privately held company on the other hand doesn't have to look at the books but they can adjust for the value of keeping customer loyalty by knowingly giving up some profits in the short term.
And FYI, of course top execs will own more shares and thus vote themselves onto the board. It doesn't mean that they don't let people cash their shares out at a decent price-if they fixed the price horribly then the execs wouldn't ever get a good payday either. The article is contradicting itself, if the higher up execs are the biggest shareholders then logically they'd protect shareholder interests the most-make sure people get paid dividends, get good cashouts when they leave the company, etc. It's really not Huawei's fault that Chinese law prevents foreigners from owning shares of mainland stocks-go and try to buy stock on the Shanghai stock exchange and you'll very quickly find out that you can't. But the article makes it sound like some sort of evil excuse Huawei has cooked up to discriminate against it's foreign employees when in reality most foreign employees get higher wages than their local counterparts.
And the whole "Huawei was founded by the Chinese government/military/whatever" sounds really sinister...until you realize that being a communist country pretty much EVERYTHING was founded by the Chinese government. Or military. Or post office. Because when they first allowed privatization there weren't that many banks, or anybody with actual credit history, to make business loans. Who's gonna loan you $30 million to start a company when they just started allowing companies yesterday? So it was almost always the people already running an existing publicly owned company that branched into the private sector. And when you don't have banks a lot of these people often raised the private side of the funding by asking all their existing employees to buy into the new (partly) private enterprise. I know, totally sinister.
Another thing you have to remember is that in a place that was totally communist, where are you going to find people who know how to engineer communications products? The nonexistent private engineering companies?! Like 90% of the engineers in China were in some branch of the military. Kinda like how DARPA invented the internet and microwaves. Is it really surprising that in a country that had no private enterprise at all, someone who founded a communications equipment company would have come from the military?
Viewing things completely through a Westernized idea of economics is pretty ridiculous-completely ignoring how the Chinese economy was back in the 80's and 90's. How do you raise funds to start a company when nobody has any money (since everyone only had meager wages from their government jobs)? The only way was basically to convince some branch of government, and it's talented employees, to help fund whatever business you wanted. This is how the post office in China ended up owning bowling alleys-not because there was a sinister plot by the Chinese to hide mail snooping cameras in your bowling balls, but because the postmaster decided thought that bowling alleys would be popular. This is why so many companies hired ex-military engineers, and why EVERYONE hired ex-government engineers (because there was no other kind).
Full disclosure-I know both people who work fairly high up at Huawei, and people who decided that the post office should go into the bowling alley business (which, on a side note, made decent money until every other guy decided to start a bowling alley and nobody made any money [the Chinese economy has these hilarious "fads"-just go to any mall in China and wonder at the redundancy of 95% of the stores selling the exact same items]).
At any rate Huawei isn't without issues, but I'd say that the problems aren't so much of hidden backdoors for evil government spies so much as some routers having terrible security and being prone to viruses/malware. I remember logging onto free wifi at hotels in China and the malware compromised router was trying to inject malware into EVERY SINGLE PAGE you browsed to. On a hunch I tried a few router admin IPs and found that there was...no password whatsoever setup for the router and that it had probably been left totally open to the internet, allowing people to put whatever shady firmware they wanted onto it. Was this likely partly the IT guy at the hotel's fault? No, because they probably didn't have an IT guy, but it was partly the fault of whichever dude set their wifi up, while also largely the fault of Huawei for not making their routers more idiot proof. Of course this was years ago so I suspect that they've improved security, but to make questionable competence in security equivalent to evil purposefully placed backdoors is pretty ridiculous.
The X-Fi3 keeps with the company's commitment to audio fidelity, thanks to the apt-X codec, which supposedly offers audio quality similar to a wired connection when streaming. On that front, the device also handles FLAC files.
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Do not trust Huawei.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5993156.ece
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/175946,analysis-who-really-owns-huawei.aspx
@bigtoke lol, the 2nd article is really reaching there-why should companies have to be publicly listed?!? I actually think that being publicly listed for growth/funding is one of the worst aspects of western economies, since it puts an insanely heavy focus on short term profits over long term success. If you don't meet some completely arbitrary quarterly target that random Wall Street analysts set, your stock price tanks and then the board is forced to fire you because they have to "represent the shareholders' interests." even though they clearly just care about the short term. This is how Steve Jobs got fired from Apple when their earnings weren't doing so well, the reason why some really terrible CEOs get huge paydays just because the economy carries their companies along (see entire GM executive team throughout the 90's and 2000's until bankruptcy), etc. Decide to make huge gas-hogging SUVs that returned a lot of short term profits? Huge paydays and contracts that meant that they kept getting huge paydays even when things went south. Have a long term vision for your computer company that leads to some slow short term growth? You're fired. I'm not even a big Steve Jobs fan but it's just one of the many, many, examples where publicly traded companies behave as if the only thing that matters is the next quarter or the next year.
There are plenty of very successfully run private companies that I respect a heck of a lot more than their publicly listed competitors. Wegmans is a supermarket chain that consistently shows up at the top of the "best places to work for" list that Fortune runs, and they're privately held (and yes, this is the supermarket whose store brand stuff you keep seeing on The Office). Being privately held meant that when the economy tanked with the recent stock market crash, they cut prices very, very, aggressively. A publicly held company would have been given like 100 lashes by their shareholders for gutting profit margins. A privately held company on the other hand doesn't have to look at the books but they can adjust for the value of keeping customer loyalty by knowingly giving up some profits in the short term.
And FYI, of course top execs will own more shares and thus vote themselves onto the board. It doesn't mean that they don't let people cash their shares out at a decent price-if they fixed the price horribly then the execs wouldn't ever get a good payday either. The article is contradicting itself, if the higher up execs are the biggest shareholders then logically they'd protect shareholder interests the most-make sure people get paid dividends, get good cashouts when they leave the company, etc. It's really not Huawei's fault that Chinese law prevents foreigners from owning shares of mainland stocks-go and try to buy stock on the Shanghai stock exchange and you'll very quickly find out that you can't. But the article makes it sound like some sort of evil excuse Huawei has cooked up to discriminate against it's foreign employees when in reality most foreign employees get higher wages than their local counterparts.
And the whole "Huawei was founded by the Chinese government/military/whatever" sounds really sinister...until you realize that being a communist country pretty much EVERYTHING was founded by the Chinese government. Or military. Or post office. Because when they first allowed privatization there weren't that many banks, or anybody with actual credit history, to make business loans. Who's gonna loan you $30 million to start a company when they just started allowing companies yesterday? So it was almost always the people already running an existing publicly owned company that branched into the private sector. And when you don't have banks a lot of these people often raised the private side of the funding by asking all their existing employees to buy into the new (partly) private enterprise. I know, totally sinister.
Another thing you have to remember is that in a place that was totally communist, where are you going to find people who know how to engineer communications products? The nonexistent private engineering companies?! Like 90% of the engineers in China were in some branch of the military. Kinda like how DARPA invented the internet and microwaves. Is it really surprising that in a country that had no private enterprise at all, someone who founded a communications equipment company would have come from the military?
Viewing things completely through a Westernized idea of economics is pretty ridiculous-completely ignoring how the Chinese economy was back in the 80's and 90's. How do you raise funds to start a company when nobody has any money (since everyone only had meager wages from their government jobs)? The only way was basically to convince some branch of government, and it's talented employees, to help fund whatever business you wanted. This is how the post office in China ended up owning bowling alleys-not because there was a sinister plot by the Chinese to hide mail snooping cameras in your bowling balls, but because the postmaster decided thought that bowling alleys would be popular. This is why so many companies hired ex-military engineers, and why EVERYONE hired ex-government engineers (because there was no other kind).
Full disclosure-I know both people who work fairly high up at Huawei, and people who decided that the post office should go into the bowling alley business (which, on a side note, made decent money until every other guy decided to start a bowling alley and nobody made any money [the Chinese economy has these hilarious "fads"-just go to any mall in China and wonder at the redundancy of 95% of the stores selling the exact same items]).
At any rate Huawei isn't without issues, but I'd say that the problems aren't so much of hidden backdoors for evil government spies so much as some routers having terrible security and being prone to viruses/malware. I remember logging onto free wifi at hotels in China and the malware compromised router was trying to inject malware into EVERY SINGLE PAGE you browsed to.
On a hunch I tried a few router admin IPs and found that there was...no password whatsoever setup for the router and that it had probably been left totally open to the internet, allowing people to put whatever shady firmware they wanted onto it. Was this likely partly the IT guy at the hotel's fault? No, because they probably didn't have an IT guy, but it was partly the fault of whichever dude set their wifi up, while also largely the fault of Huawei for not making their routers more idiot proof. Of course this was years ago so I suspect that they've improved security, but to make questionable competence in security equivalent to evil purposefully placed backdoors is pretty ridiculous.
@techdaemon
+1
great and correct reply.
Uninformed Eastern or Western cowboy judgment doesn't require much brain work.