The mainland Chinese office is not the "corporate office" of Proview. Both Proview in Shenzhen and the Proview in Taiwan are subsidiaries of Proview International Holdings listed in Hong Kong. According to this article they first tried this in a Hong Kong court which ruled in Apple's favor. So the "Corporate" office tried this once failed and then moved onto another subsidiary that was in a jurisdiction known for less than honest courts. Their claim may still be valid but the jurisdiction shopping aspect of this makes it look less likely to me. What I don't understand is why Apple would deal with the Taiwan portion of the company vs. the Hong Kong parent in the first place. They defiantly made a mistake by not going to the top of the organization.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/chinese-firm-in-ipad-row-threatens-to-sue-apple-in-us/articleshow/11925050.cms
All to often management is willing to accept the mistakes new people are going to make simply because it helps the bottom line short term. You layoff an experienced engineer making $150,000 and replace him with a fresh out of college guy making $60,000. In the short term the manager cuts the cost of his division and looks more profitable. If they have costs later on because of some problem that the more experienced guy would have simply avoided so what. By the time that happens the manager who made the decision will have usually pocketed his bonuses and moved on. So it is the next guy who is suddenly stuck fixing whatever went wrong. From my point of view this is just more of the same MBA mentality that is one of the factors wrecking American business.
The part of that NYTimes piece that I think captures the real problem is the part about the glass company. They were able to gear up and build a new wing to their factory just in case they get the contract. Part of that is due to subsidies from the Chinese government the other part is due to their regulatory environment. No American company can expand facilities like that. If they had tried that in the US they'd still be trying to get regulatory approval for the factory expansion. The simple fact is that even if China started treating their workers better, don't hold your breath, they would still be able to move much faster than us. By the time our company figures out whether they can expand their factory to meet the demand the Chinese company has had the product on sale for a year. If we want any chance of competing we need to figure out a way to have reasonable standards without hampering our industry so much.
My memory is that the US failed to adopt the metric system primarily because we had such a poorly thought out and poorly implemented plan. I can remember being taught metric in elementary school and hearing about how the transition was supposed to go. Then seeing it in the real world. I can clearly remember things like my mother being pissed off because some brands of things started selling in metric units while other brands were still selling in imperial units. Since pretty much nothing had conversion markings on it, and the older generation hadn't been taught the metric system in decades, people were having a hard time telling whether item A was a better deal than item B due to unclear measuring standards. In particular I can remember my father, who was an electrical engineer and physicist, doing the math to convert between price per gallon and price per liter on gasoline. He was particularly annoyed because he kept finding instances were people were using the transition, and the fact that a large portion of the populace was ignorant of the new measures, to gouge people. In my view the real problem was that they just tried to change over. They would have been better off requiring that when you change over you provide a conversion to the old system until everyone is changed over. Go and talk to some older people who had to deal with it and don't be surprised if remembering our attempted change over brings out a string of expletives. A little bit of planning and some standards for the change over would have gone a long way toward making it a success. By the time they gave up it was because the botched job had enraged a huge chunk of the populace. One thing about elected government if they public gets pissed enough they back off. That is usually good, occasionally it is bad.
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The mainland Chinese office is not the "corporate office" of Proview. Both Proview in Shenzhen and the Proview in Taiwan are subsidiaries of Proview International Holdings listed in Hong Kong. According to this article they first tried this in a Hong Kong court which ruled in Apple's favor. So the "Corporate" office tried this once failed and then moved onto another subsidiary that was in a jurisdiction known for less than honest courts. Their claim may still be valid but the jurisdiction shopping aspect of this makes it look less likely to me. What I don't understand is why Apple would deal with the Taiwan portion of the company vs. the Hong Kong parent in the first place. They defiantly made a mistake by not going to the top of the organization. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/chinese-firm-in-ipad-row-threatens-to-sue-apple-in-us/articleshow/11925050.cms
All to often management is willing to accept the mistakes new people are going to make simply because it helps the bottom line short term. You layoff an experienced engineer making $150,000 and replace him with a fresh out of college guy making $60,000. In the short term the manager cuts the cost of his division and looks more profitable. If they have costs later on because of some problem that the more experienced guy would have simply avoided so what. By the time that happens the manager who made the decision will have usually pocketed his bonuses and moved on. So it is the next guy who is suddenly stuck fixing whatever went wrong. From my point of view this is just more of the same MBA mentality that is one of the factors wrecking American business.
The part of that NYTimes piece that I think captures the real problem is the part about the glass company. They were able to gear up and build a new wing to their factory just in case they get the contract. Part of that is due to subsidies from the Chinese government the other part is due to their regulatory environment. No American company can expand facilities like that. If they had tried that in the US they'd still be trying to get regulatory approval for the factory expansion. The simple fact is that even if China started treating their workers better, don't hold your breath, they would still be able to move much faster than us. By the time our company figures out whether they can expand their factory to meet the demand the Chinese company has had the product on sale for a year. If we want any chance of competing we need to figure out a way to have reasonable standards without hampering our industry so much.
My memory is that the US failed to adopt the metric system primarily because we had such a poorly thought out and poorly implemented plan. I can remember being taught metric in elementary school and hearing about how the transition was supposed to go. Then seeing it in the real world. I can clearly remember things like my mother being pissed off because some brands of things started selling in metric units while other brands were still selling in imperial units. Since pretty much nothing had conversion markings on it, and the older generation hadn't been taught the metric system in decades, people were having a hard time telling whether item A was a better deal than item B due to unclear measuring standards. In particular I can remember my father, who was an electrical engineer and physicist, doing the math to convert between price per gallon and price per liter on gasoline. He was particularly annoyed because he kept finding instances were people were using the transition, and the fact that a large portion of the populace was ignorant of the new measures, to gouge people. In my view the real problem was that they just tried to change over. They would have been better off requiring that when you change over you provide a conversion to the old system until everyone is changed over. Go and talk to some older people who had to deal with it and don't be surprised if remembering our attempted change over brings out a string of expletives. A little bit of planning and some standards for the change over would have gone a long way toward making it a success. By the time they gave up it was because the botched job had enraged a huge chunk of the populace. One thing about elected government if they public gets pissed enough they back off. That is usually good, occasionally it is bad.