A lot of good work can be undone very quickly, especially by acts that enforce negative impressions. So you have to wonder why a company as well resourced as Huawei can't manage to develop its own promotional materials.
It might not be the biggest transgression in the world, but it sends out all the wrong signals.
Earlier this year Nokia Siemens Networks cried foul when it spotted a lot of similarities between some of its marketing materials and those distributed by Huawei. (See NSN Sticks It to Huawei.)
Now Austrian vendor Kapsch CarrierCom AG has felt compelled to highlight what appears to be not only a near-carbon copy of its marketing materials for a recent industry event, but the re-use of some Web code.
Sabina Berloffa, vice president of marketing at Kapsch CarrierCom, made her views quite clear on her company's website -- see Kapsch vs. Huawei: Find the differences -- after Huawei issued promotional materials that not only resembled Kapsch's in practically every respect but which also included a hyperlink to Kapsch's contact details.
No steps forward, then, and one big step back...
— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading
I believe the time has come for the wireless service providers to fully recognize unethical nature of Huawei and reject their product instead of trying to save a few bucks. After all, not only the thief goes to prison but also the guy who buys the stolen goods.
If you do get flamed, google on the phrases. Most likely the "flames" would have been pinched from some existing source.
Seriously though, this is sad. The very triviality of this infraction serves to make it tragic. I hope someone in the new Chinese establishment wakes up to the fact that this really hurts their brand.
The entire company was built by illegally copying software and hardware from others. The reason they succeeded instead of ending up behind bars was that the chinese government was solidly behind them.
Some years back, we took our HW/SW telecom product to their office in Shenzhen for a demo. They liked the product, and at the end of the meeting they asked if we could leave behind the unit with them for 2 weeks for some "testing". We all knew what that meant. We got out of that place as fast as we could.
Just goes to show you the prevalent mindset at Huawei, from top to bottom. If it's not nailed down, they'll rip it off... and "nailing down" intellectual property is hard.
I was approached by a Huawei recruiter earlier this year to help them build software for their datacenter switches. Are you kidding me? Why would I help the PLA rip off even more of our technology?
As "sailboat" says -- go ahead and flame all you want.
Just like in politics, re-asserting falsehoods over and over doesn't make them any more real.
If Huawei were to repurpose all those staff who work on lobbying and who work on copying, and who try to use pressure to convince us Huawei is a "safe good partner".... I wonder if they repurposed those resources, could they start to generate their own marketing material?
(not to mention taking a leap with their own technology....be really nice to see all those PhD's brains really making a BIG difference instead of just copying western platforms. I know they have some smart people!)
Note: I have experienced H doing this same thing on some marketing materials I created some years ago and shared wtih them under NDA. virtual copies of some power points I made.... showed up in their own presentations without any credit to the source of the material. I stopped giving them copies of my presentations after this event. In this case it was fairly innocuous, and nothing was in those slides that would really help them. But it was a big wake up call.
I keep waiting for H to grow up and become professional. Of course if that happens, they would probably loose their price advantage.
reality really bites sometimes.
OK, let the flames begin!! I am sure I will be jumped on by all the trolls trying to defend bad behavior.
The blogs and comments are the opinions only of the writers and do not reflect the views of Light Reading. They are no substitute for your own research and should not be relied upon for trading or any other purpose.
More EuroBlog
SDN Added to Interop Test 11:00 AM OpenFlow and Path Computation Element (PCE) will be part of EANTC's annual multivendor Carrier Ethernet/MPLS interoperability test
To save this item to your list of favorite Light Reading content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
