Well, it want be a product because israeli companies never bring anything to the market, just create hype and exit as soon as they can. In general the state of IT in Israel is quite sad from usability and design perspective. Most of it looks like it was developed in the 90s and was never touched again (ie my university’s e-learning platform). As for consumer products, was there anything after Epilady?
I like how you paint all the companies from a single country with such a wide brush! You are very wrong - A few Israeli startups that have made revolutionary products, off the top of my head:
Talking about hardware. Though even based on the software products mentioned here, why Israel a startup nation? There are other countries other than USA, that had success with more products and far less hype.
Again, from usability and design perspective, internal market, Israel’s infrastructure is very backward. Universities, banks, governments ... everything was developed by one company, a contractor of Microsoft Israel called Matrix, and it looks as bad as it sounds.
On top of my head only from HW perspective, one of biggest Intel microprocessors R&D centers is located in Haifa IL (recently leading the Ice Lake - Core i9) and manufacturing center in Kiryat Gat. Intel also acquired MobileEye for their autonomous cars technology. Apple had a few acquisitions in the recent years such as Primesense (the inventors of MS XBOX Kinect sensors), KLA acquired Orbotech, IBM acquired Trusteer and so on. Moving this thread to SW will make it blast. Either way, the contributions of such a small country to the tech world is not proportional.
USA corporations like IBM, Microsoft, Google and Intel buy and invest all over the world. In Israel Microsoft’s investment was used (as well) to stop the government (ministry of education) to drop any interest in open source and free software.
So it’s a mixed bag. I’m specifically talking about bringing products to market. There are non.
And “looking at my comments history” to not-a-patriot shame me is soooo Israeli... I tell it like it is. Again, what’s was Israel’s big product brought to market after Epilady?
What about Indians stuffing (unprofessionally) IT jobs all over the world, including Israel btw, ... at least until they brought cheap Russian labor as part of Shamir’s demographics re-engineering of Israel to produce a “Jewish” majority with (at least) 30% non-Jewish Russians...
but that’s another story and yet another myth needs busting.
Forgot to mention how often Intel threatened to close shop if it want get the tax exemptions it insisted on. So, let's be honest, there's hardly anything special about this pattern of corporate investment and outsourcing of development.
I cut my teeth on Industrial automation and robotics in High school on an Eshed Robotec system (now Intellitech and seem to have downsized). There's also ACS motion control and Galil motion control. All Israeli.
All main Intel uArchs since after Pentium 4 are derived from Israeli work. They did the Pentium M, which became the Core series after Intel finally figured out they weren't going to get 10GHz 30 stage pipeline Pentium 4s. The Israeli group's work basically saved Intel in the mid 2000s from AMD's competition.
I remember speaking to a guy at a bar. He said he worked at IBM, and wanted me to write the software for an "unhackable" phone, that "never needs to be updated". I think I left shortly after.
Why would an unhackable phone require update capability? A smartphone almost certainly would, but I don’t see why a simple dumbphone would require such.
I view working for NSO Group is no different than working for any arms company. And there is a lot of money to be made selling arms to despots and dictators. In part, because it is those leaders who have the least legitimacy are those who are the most insecure and feel need the strongest tools to solidify their rule.
Secure leaders do not need to stockpile arms, nor do they need to forcibly suppress their dissidents (which is what I understand is the main market is for NSO Group's tools.)
> I would think that the different national intelligence agencies would have high interest in infiltrating such companies.
I bet in general non-governmental companies, especially with distributed offices, distributed sales teams, are especially easy to hack/infiltrate.
But NSO Group's target has never been other countries, it has been focused on helping governments infiltrate their citizen's and opponent's phones, which is a much softer target.
It's quite clever actually, why spend resources to try and infiltrate them - which is not a guarantee, when you can pay a fraction of the cost for their capabilities so you can focus your efforts on other nation states or your own citizens.
36 comments
[ 7.9 ms ] story [ 74.2 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellanox_Technologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobileye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viber
Oh and Apple, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Motorola, and Google have offices there - so perhaps there is some tech talent there? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Wadi)
Again, from usability and design perspective, internal market, Israel’s infrastructure is very backward. Universities, banks, governments ... everything was developed by one company, a contractor of Microsoft Israel called Matrix, and it looks as bad as it sounds.
So it’s a mixed bag. I’m specifically talking about bringing products to market. There are non.
And “looking at my comments history” to not-a-patriot shame me is soooo Israeli... I tell it like it is. Again, what’s was Israel’s big product brought to market after Epilady?
What about Indians stuffing (unprofessionally) IT jobs all over the world, including Israel btw, ... at least until they brought cheap Russian labor as part of Shamir’s demographics re-engineering of Israel to produce a “Jewish” majority with (at least) 30% non-Jewish Russians...
but that’s another story and yet another myth needs busting.
Not mentioned yet: SodaStream, RedisLabs, (now Google's) Anthos migrate.
And there are so many more that your statement is ridiculous. What have you done lately?
* https://citizenlab.ca/?s=nso+group
Secure leaders do not need to stockpile arms, nor do they need to forcibly suppress their dissidents (which is what I understand is the main market is for NSO Group's tools.)
Well that can be more of a factor of what their foreign policy is / situation is and less about internal legitimacy.
Maybe better said they don't need to stockpile arms for domestic use as much if they feel secure / legitimate.
I would think that the different national intelligence agencies would have high interest in infiltrating such companies.
I bet in general non-governmental companies, especially with distributed offices, distributed sales teams, are especially easy to hack/infiltrate.
But NSO Group's target has never been other countries, it has been focused on helping governments infiltrate their citizen's and opponent's phones, which is a much softer target.