201–210 of 366 posts
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No. US can't make these machines. Laser facility in US would suffer too.
> US can't make these machines. The US is pretty dynamic. So is every country. To the extent it appears not to be there is usually some entity with it's thumb on the scale.
The press release ( https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2026/strengtheni... ) seems remarkably to the point, for CEO press release standards. I'm impressed by their ambition to fire 1700 managers (!) That's a lot of managers! I interviewed with ASML a decade and a half ago and while there was plenty to complain about (eg their tens of millions of lines of absolutely unmaintainable C code), I didn't feel at th…
(I am not saying OP is talking like that about them, but I am seeing some responses that do...)
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Has anyone in the last 10 years praised Google for anything, ever? They've been engaged in enshittification the entire time. Search is getting worse, Youtube is getting worse, Android is getting worse, Chrome is getting worse. They are indeed a hollow shell of the company that originally established themselves, but now that they have such a wide-ranging monopoly they can freely debase the value of their products to e…
Google is still the best search engine. YouTube is still the best video site. Android is still the best operating system. Chrome is still the best browser. And on the side they built the best AI and the best autonomous ride service. Not bad for a "hollow shell" of a company.
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Thanks for sharing. You know what's ironic about Qimonda? China bought their IP after they went under, and used it to build two domestic NAND and DRAM manufacturers that are set to become giants. Funny how China has the vision to use, finance and monetize where western governments keep failing. That's what hurts the most to see. EU says they want a strong domestic electronics industry, but with the exception of ASML,…
It seems to me (and maybe I'm wrong), but it seems to me that "a lack of IP" increasingly means "we have no leverage to get the licences that we need" in China, and "we have no idea how they used to do it" in the west.
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> Within a couple of years the Philips people were able to transform the company to be very management/top heavy until nothing worked anymore You see the same pattern with Siemens and a lot of their spinoffs: Continental(VDO), Infineon, Qimonda, Gigaset, Healthineers (yes, that's a real name that somebody got paid to come up with), etc THe ones without some major moat like trains or energy, got slowly run into the gr…
My guess is German labor laws do not allow hustling. Progress will be slow if everyone kinda just coast on cruise control.
I’m generally supportive of the tech industry’s move to rid itself of too many mangers. Most managers are no longer technical, and just create bloated middle layers that slow everyone else down. The only managers that are decent are the ones that have kept their technical skills sharp. Most others just seem to be able to say “my team will follow-up” and “my team will look into this” and are beyond useless. Few are sh…
> Most managers are no longer technical, and just create bloated middle layers that slow everyone else down. > The only managers that are decent are the ones that have kept their technical skills sharp. Alex Ferguson was a terrible footballer when he was managing Manchester United. Yet they won the premiership in 6 of his last 10 years in that role, and have never won it since he left. The skills that make one great…
Good management is rare.
Can someone explain, why this is done? I get a feeling, it's normally done when a company is in trouble or will soon? But they should have more money than ever. They say it is to focus on innovation, but if you are a smart young person in NL, would you want to work where they just fired 1700 people? And if you already work there and are a top player it is a good time to rethink? A company I know wanted to focus, inst…
I worked for a company that went through 2 cycles like this and I can report that it had zero effect on us engineers. My impression was that people were constantly being promoted into management and at some point we just had too many managers and that's why it was done. Of course, when you know this, the question becomes: why allow things to get to this point in the first place?
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While you are not wrong, many of the cases I observed had managers from all over the world. I think it's just a symptom. As a manager, you contribute nothing by yourself. You are useful if you have a useful team (ICs) with a good project. To have that, you need to defend yourself against other managers who will take this from you. If you then also want to get prompted, your task is also to vacuum in all sorts of soft…
Having ICs with no organization, synchronization or shared vision creates chaos, toxicity and a lot of technical debt. You can easily create negative value. ICs need direction to be successful, and well managed people are much happier in my experience than non-managed people.
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Three things: 1. From the perspective of shareholders, and for the moment ignoring taxes, buybacks and dividends are exactly economically equivalent. If a dividend happens, you get some cash. If a buyback happens, the value of your shares goes up. Crucially, the amount by which each share's price goes up is equal to what the per-share dividend would have been . It's a useful exercise to work this out and convince you…
This is not quite correct. If a dividend happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the dividend, the number of shares remains constant, so the share price dips by the amount of the dividend per share. All investors get the dividend. If a buyback happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the buyback, and the number of shares drops by the same ratio, keeping the share price initially con…
The investors who sell are wealthier by amount $X because now they have fewer shares and more dollars.
The investors who don't sell are wealthier by the same amount $X because the shares they kept are worth more, because prices go up.
> keeping the share price initially constant. This statement is definitely incorrect, unless you're being very technicaly and pedantic about "initially". You can think about it theoretically or you can look at empirical evidence. It is well-supported empirically that share prices go up after buybacks, and in fact they do so quantitatively by exactly the amount necessary for the equation implied above to hold.