Word: siliconing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Businesses are quicker than ever to cut off fired employees' access to computer systems and more willing than ever to go to court. This year Silicon Valley celebrated a landmark prosecution in which, after four years, Avant Corp. and seven of its current and former executives were forced to pay $220 million in fines and restitution for stealing secrets from a rival tech firm. Avant got information by paying off an engineer from the targeted firm...
...returns to jail, e-book publishers will have free rein to use Adobe's security restrictions on what little e-book market there is. If he returns to Moscow, Silicon Valley will breathe easy and more of us may end up reading e-books on our computers. Whether we will have paid for them is another question entirely...
Flextronics got its start in Silicon Valley in 1969 as a "board stuffing" operation back in the days when computer circuit boards were soldered and assembled by hand. In 1990, as recession struck the U.S. and much of the world, Flextronics sold off all its U.S. operations and reincorporated in Singapore; from there it operated a few factories in Southeast Asia and southern China. Flextronics grew steadily through the '90s, leveraging its early presence in Malaysia and China into a solid share of the "enclosures" market--doing final assembly for cellular phones, personal computers and printers. But when the Asian...
Then providence intervened. Swedish telecom giant Ericsson decided that it had become too costly to produce all its wireless switching equipment and, after researching Silicon Valley's contract manufacturers, awarded a $300 million deal to Flextronics (whose revenues at the time were only $400 million). "That launched us in Europe almost overnight," says Marks. "There was no other contract manufacturing going on there, so we were able to move very quickly with other acquisitions...
Flextronics' most sophisticated operations, which manufacture routers for Cisco and wireless base stations for Ericsson, are based in places like Silicon Valley and Sweden, where top talent is available. Its most labor-intensive operations are still in China, where Flextronics mostly makes comparatively simple electronic products, from PC parts for Dell and mouse assemblies for Microsoft to cell phones for Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson...