Speaking of the world's famous technology giants, whether it is Apple, Samsung, Microsoft or Google, we should all be very familiar with them. We use the hardware or software of these giants, and our impression of them in our hearts often has some small halo, and we think that technology giants are all glamorous.
However, all commercial enterprises are bound to be profit-seeking in their bones, and sometimes they can't avoid doing some sneaky things for the sake of profit. For example, technology theft between technology companies, such cases occur several times almost every year.
Since most of the technology giants are not particularly clean, these "theft cases" are often not exposed to the public except when they openly break up. But in secret, these technology giants are undoubtedly performing a technological version of "Mission Impossible" at any time.
1 Samsung's past of stealing skills
Samsung should be very unhappy these two days because the folding screen technology it spent a lot of money to develop was accidentally stolen, and it is very likely that it was leaked to Chinese manufacturers.
According to foreign media reports, on November 29, the South Korean prosecutors had filed a lawsuit against 11 suspects in this technology theft case, three of whom have been arrested.
Speaking of which, this case is also a typical example of technology theft. The people involved used fake names, contact information and personal email addresses to open a shell company, and stole Samsung's equipment and drawings and other documents to resell to Chinese companies.
There is no doubt that Samsung should be the victim in this case. But if we trace it back to a few years ago, Samsung has actually done some not-so-glorious things. The most representative of these is undoubtedly the semiconductor chip dispute with TSMC.
As advanced semiconductor manufacturers in the world, Samsung and TSMC have been fighting each other in the chip field. But TSMC, as the leader of the entire industry, was much more advanced than Samsung in terms of technology, while Samsung was constrained by limited technology and insufficient production capacity.
Later, with the emergence of smartphones, Samsung was the first to notice the opportunities in the mobile phone industry and obtained Apple's foundry orders at cost price. Therefore, from the first generation of iPhone to the subsequent A5/A6/A7 chips, Apple has been purchasing ARM architecture chips from Samsung.
However, the development of things eventually got out of Samsung's control. When it came to the 20-nanometer process stage of the chip industry, TSMC's technology began to lead Samsung in all aspects, while Samsung's 20-nanometer process yield rate has not been effectively broken through. At the same time, Apple, which had been cooperating with Samsung before, also threw itself into the arms of TSMC and gave all the orders for the A8 processor of the iPhone 6 to TSMC.
At this unfortunate moment, a strange thing happened. Samsung, which had been stuck in the 20-nanometer process and could not make a breakthrough, suddenly announced that it had made a breakthrough in the 14-nanometer chip process and achieved mass production.
We all know that technology accumulation is often a gradual process. Why did Samsung, which has always been unable to keep up with TSMC, suddenly become enlightened and surpass TSMC in 14nm process?
In order to find out the truth, some people carefully studied Samsung's latest 14nm process technology and found that there was something fishy about it. In terms of origin, Samsung's earliest semiconductor process was inherited from IBM, and its transistors were disc-shaped, rather than TSMC's exclusive prismatic structure.
But in Samsung's latest 14nm process, everything suddenly took a 180-degree turn and became a prismatic structure. This investigation result undoubtedly made TSMC very angry. Someone must have stolen its own technology from TSMC, so it ordered a thorough investigation of the leaker.
After this order for a thorough investigation, the truth soon surfaced. It turned out that Samsung's technology was "stolen" from Liang Mengsong, the former R&D director of TSMC.
As the technical expert with the most patents among TSMC executives, Liang Mengsong was responsible for or participated in the technical research and development of almost all of TSMC's advanced processes. However, after failing to compete for the position of vice president of TSMC in 2009, he chose to leave TSMC and teach at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea.
However, after being sued by TSMC, it was revealed that Liang Mengsong had been secretly providing services to Samsung from 2009 to 2011. His teaching at Sungkyunkwan University was actually a scam. The institution where he actually taught was Samsung's Samsung Institute of Semiconductor Technology, and many of his "students" were actually senior employees of Samsung.
In July 2011, after the expiration of the non-compete agreement with TSMC, Liang Mengsong joined Samsung directly and served as the vice president of research and development of Samsung Electronics. Just after he joined Samsung, Samsung gradually caught up with TSMC in 45nm, 32nm and 28nm processes, and took the lead in providing Samsung with 14nm processes.
It was not until then that TSMC discovered the clues and collected evidence to sue Liang Mengsong, and the truth behind it finally surfaced. Because of this "stealing" origin, many people still often joke that Samsung's 14nm process technology is actually stolen.
2 Apple's Secret to Success
Speaking of Apple, it should be difficult for everyone to associate this company with the four words "technology theft". As the world's most profitable mobile phone manufacturer, Apple, which has strong financial resources, has accumulated a large number of technical patents in both hardware and software fields. Therefore, in the news we are familiar with, Apple is often the landlord whose technology is stolen, rather than the thief who steals technology from other people's homes.
For example, according to Apple's official disclosure, they arrested 29 leakers in 2017 alone, and 12 of them were arrested and prosecuted. In July this year, the media also widely reported a case about Apple's Chinese employees stealing its autonomous driving technology.
In this case, a Chinese employee named Zhao copied and stole a large amount of sensitive technology related to Apple's autonomous driving, and planned to return to China to join the Xiaopeng Motors team. However, he was caught by the FBI as soon as he arrived at the U.S. Customs, and he was caught red-handed. He may eventually face 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
In this way, Apple should be a defender of intellectual property and trade secrets protection. However, all this is based on Apple's current solid accumulation of patents. If we go back 35 years, Apple did not have such a high awareness at that time.
In the "Biography of Steve Jobs", there was such a past event: In 1983, Steve Jobs publicly accused Microsoft of copying Apple. That year, Microsoft launched Windows 1.0. When Jobs learned about it, he called Bill Gates to Apple headquarters and scolded Gates in front of many colleagues: "You are stealing our things!"
However, immediately afterwards, Gates calmly said the classic rebuttal quote that has been passed down in Silicon Valley to this day: "We all have a rich neighbor named Xerox. When I broke into their house to steal the TV, I found that you had already stolen it."
What did Gates mean by this sentence? It is also explained in "The Biography of Steve Jobs".
In the early days of computer technology, the commonly used interface was called the command line interface (CUI), which means there was no graphics, and the screen was full of characters. Xerox, as one of the pioneers in the computer industry at that time, was the first to think of using graphics as the user interface display (GUI) for computer operation.
It was because Jobs secretly saw the GUI developed by Xerox that he went back and started to develop his own GUI, and also poached a group of people from Xerox.
It is particularly important to mention that the GUI of Xerox was developed internally and has never been made public, but it has never been taken seriously by Xerox's senior management. So Jobs actually forced Xerox's marketing department to put pressure on the R&D department through some dishonorable means after knowing that Xerox had such a research, so that they secretly demonstrated it to Apple inside Xerox.
3 Microsoft's copying skills
As a long-established Internet company that grew up in the last century, Microsoft is worthy of admiration in many aspects. However, Windows, which Microsoft relied on to start its business, actually started by copying.
As we mentioned earlier, Jobs accused Windows 1.0 of copying the interface of Apple Mac (also known as Macintosh in the early days), but in fact, Gates's wise words were also a way to give Microsoft a way out.
Although Apple's interface was "stolen" from Xerox, at least it added a lot of its own things. But when Microsoft first started Windows, it copied Apple's interface almost exactly.
So when Jobs called him to Apple headquarters, Gates was actually ready to be troubled by Jobs. After the two had a big fight, Gates demonstrated Windows to Jobs alone, and Jobs' evaluation of the thing Gates copied was: This is simply a pile of shit. Fortunately, Gates was thick-skinned and jokingly replied: It's a good pile of shit.
However, fortunately, the relationship between Jobs and Gates was not as bad as imagined, and Apple's Mac system had to rely on Microsoft to develop software for itself, so in the end Jobs could only say to Gates: It's okay for you to copy, but please try not to be too similar to ours.
In short, in the technology industry, many technology giants have actually done something similar to "stealing" behind the scenes, including some domestic technology giants we are familiar with. However, considering some unspeakable risks, let's just shake off the burdens of foreign giants today.
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