The US Cannot Crush Us, Says Huawei Founder (bbc.com)
The founder of Huawei has said there is "no way the US can crush" the company, in an interview with the BBC. From the report: Ren Zhengfei, founder and president of Huawei, described the arrest of his daughter Meng Wanzhou, the company's chief financial officer, as politically motivated. The US is pursuing criminal charges against Huawei and Ms Meng, including money laundering, bank fraud and stealing trade secrets. Huawei denies any wrongdoing.
Mr Ren spoke to the BBC's Karishma Vaswani in his first international broadcast interview since Ms Meng was arrested -- and dismissed the pressure from the US. "There's no way the US can crush us," he said. "The world cannot leave us because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily, we can always scale things down a bit." However, he acknowledged that the potential loss of custom could have a significant impact. [...] Mr Ren warned that "the world cannot leave us because we are more advanced". "If the lights go out in the West, the East will still shine. And if the North goes dark, there is still the South. America doesn't represent the world. America only represents a portion of the world."
Mr Ren spoke to the BBC's Karishma Vaswani in his first international broadcast interview since Ms Meng was arrested -- and dismissed the pressure from the US. "There's no way the US can crush us," he said. "The world cannot leave us because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily, we can always scale things down a bit." However, he acknowledged that the potential loss of custom could have a significant impact. [...] Mr Ren warned that "the world cannot leave us because we are more advanced". "If the lights go out in the West, the East will still shine. And if the North goes dark, there is still the South. America doesn't represent the world. America only represents a portion of the world."
When asked, Mr. Ren did not wish to discuss the communist party members they were forced to hire in order to monitor their compliance with the Chinese government's diktat that all software companies must be available to be part of state intelligence collection operations. Instead he ended the interview.
Bosack and his wife Lerner founded Cisco when both of them were still employed at Stanford. Bosack continued working at Stanford with Cisco co-worker and co-founder Kirk Lougheed, where they developed the company's first router. However, it was an exact replica of Stanford's "Blue Box" router and ran an unlicensed copy of the university's multiple-protocol router software, which was adapted into the foundation of Cisco IOS.
In 1986, Bosack and Lougheed were forced to resign from Stanford over the product's development, and the university considered filing criminal charges against Cisco over the theft of its intellectual property. However, Stanford eventually agreed to license its router software and two computer boards to Cisco in 1987.