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Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

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Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#121

Post by ktta »

bronco21016 wrote: post #106
ieo2929 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubiquiti ftw After a brief romance with VyOS and RPi based APs, Ubiquiti came along and swept me off my feet Currently using their gear throughout a 300-ish person office. Easy to setup, no issues that weren’t our fault in the first place. Great kit for startup and growing type situations

What was your experience with Raspberry Pi APs? I set one up for Americans traveling abroad on the original Pi B model and couldn’t get any reliability for the life of me. The VPN constantly broke down because of WiFi sleep issues. Wondering if things are better with newer hardware.

Raspberry Pis are horrible for that use case. I would suggest getting something like a TP-link WR810N or something from GL-inet if want a larger flash.

If raspberry Pi's CPU performance is absolutely necessary, use an Ethernet cable with WR810N.

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#122

Post by ktta »

jonknee wrote: post #42
siruncledrew wrote: post #4

Damn, I didn't know Foxconn was the 4th larges IT company with 726k employees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_informatio...

Almost all are factory employees assembling iPhones and the like. Not sure if I would consider that IT employment like a lot of the others on that list (Amazon's is also inflated quite a bit with warehouse and retail/grocery staff).

Apple too. Retail AFAIK is the largest division.

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#123

Post by heywire »

paulie_a wrote: post #104
VectorLock wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now we have WebEx and they're trying to make a Slack competitor.

WebEx is such an abomination of software I will never use it again.

I use WebEx daily and have almost no issues. That said, I work for a very large company and we have our own instance, so maybe we have something custom.

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#124

Post by sushid »

digi_owl wrote: post #103
ww520 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Cisco's R&D model. Buy smaller companies with interesting tech and see if their products stick. If they do, great. If not, spit them out via sale or shut them down.

Hardly unique to Cisco. Every major tech company, yes even Apple, operate they try to sustain their existence beyond their initial success.

The parent commenter is saying that Cisco essentially doesn't do much outside of the acquisition.

Companies like Google or Apple do a lot of work to integrate the existing software or hardware into their lineup (e.g. Google Voice, Google Doc, Siri, Siri music search)

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#125

Post by sushid »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #89
spiderPig wrote: post #5

It is a little disconcerting that Foxconn (subject to deep Chinese government overreach) will now own Linksys

Right? I know it's not completely analogous, but the federal government blocks a US company (Qualcomm) from buying another American company (Broadcom) over concerns about the Chinese somehow (which I still don't fully understand), but allows a Taiwanese company to buy an American network hardware division? I guess the government doesn't give a shit about consumer products.

> the federal government blocks a US company (Qualcomm) from buying another American company (Broadcom) over concerns about the Chinese somehow (which I still don't fully understand)

I'm not saying that Trump's executive order is justified (and the market predicted that Qualcomm would reject a hostile takeover attempt) but you have a few things wrong there.

1. The acquisition would be the other way around (as in Broadcom taking over Qualcomm)

2. Broadcom's parent company is a Singaporean entity. So yes, it's an American company but its parent company is Singaporean.

3. Broadcom's M&A strategy is very short sighted. It usually strips the acquisition target's R&D costs and improves its bottom line in the short term.

4. Qualcomm has a pseudo monopoly on mobile chips. All high end mobile phones use their chips. If it loses out on its future 5G technology due to a shrinking R&D budget, US loses its market dominance possibly for good.

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#126

Post by mygo »

giobox wrote: post #120
mygo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they discontinued flip video because after the acquisition they didn’t really understand the consumer and then GoPro came and they got wreckt

I think the bigger problem was cellphones, especially the iPhone, gaining the ability to record decent video. Flip filled a convenient niche for a few years until the 3GS came along with video support, after which it was useless for many consumers. This was the only reason I bought a Flip, and the only reason anyone else I know with one did. Similarly, I think the first mainstream smartphones to record HD video wasn'…

This is true. I think the iPhone did the same thing to Garmin GPS and other single-purpose hardware companies. They all lost so much of their market.

Apple already knew people were buying and would continue to buy these things, and their innovation was just putting it all into one device. So you could buy a Garmin GPS and a Flip video camera, and end up spending $300-$500 total and carry 2 devices around, or you could just buy an iPhone 3GS for $199 and also make phone calls with it.

I'm still trying to figure out the $1,000 price tag of an iPhone nowadays however. Where is the substance behind that price? (And I own an iPhone, apple watch, iPad Pro, a Macbook Pro, and a Macbook air, so I really doo appreciate a good product, just can't comprehend the value proposition of a $1000 iPhone.)

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#127

Post by Maskawanian »

alfanick wrote: post #82
Tepix wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy it. As long as their products aren't certified, I won't buy them. Besides when you look at the reviews on Amazon, some of their chargers allegedly catch fire or start to smell like burning plastic...

Their products are obviously CE certified and some of them are PSE certified. Good enough for me. Edit: Needless to say, certifications are bullshit anyway, it's just a waiver for lawyers - Samsung Galaxy Note 7 had all possible certification, yet it was as more dangerous than any Anker product.

CE isn't a certification. It is a standard that suppliers claim to adhere to. It relies entirely on their word, but is not verified at all.

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#128

Post by wtallis »

shmerl wrote: post #40

Hm. I wonder what will happen to Linksys supporting open source WiFi drivers now for their WRT/ACS routers.

Did they ever make meaningful contributions? I recall when they first revived the WRT branding, they promised open-source support for the Marvell chipsets they were now using, but it took an extremely long time for any code to show up, and it was far from being in a state to upstream. I haven't paid close attention since then, but I don't recall running across any mention that Linksys was directly helping improve the open-source Marvell drivers.

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#129

Post by shmerl »

wtallis wrote: post #128
shmerl wrote: post #40

Hm. I wonder what will happen to Linksys supporting open source WiFi drivers now for their WRT/ACS routers.

Did they ever make meaningful contributions? I recall when they first revived the WRT branding, they promised open-source support for the Marvell chipsets they were now using, but it took an extremely long time for any code to show up, and it was far from being in a state to upstream. I haven't paid close attention since then, but I don't recall running across any mention that Linksys was directly helping improve the…

It's not upstreamed, but it's regularly updated: https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi

I think @yuhhaurlin works for Linksys, but I'm not sure.

Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M

#130

Post by downrightmike »

spiderPig wrote: post #5

It is a little disconcerting that Foxconn (subject to deep Chinese government overreach) will now own Linksys

You can roll your own and get better throughput: https://www.pfsense.org/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/the-router-rumble-ar...
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