>why do you think the good people at ISoftStone and China Telecom and >Bluetech (for the second time) haven't figured out what you believe >to be true?
I am sure they have figured it out. But there is loads of money to be made from bad technology. Look at Theranos. That company was worth USD$10bn at its peak, and yet it was all based on nothing more than investor speculation and media hype. My opinion was, and remains, that NET are much the same. There is no substance to the business or the products, but that does not stop skilled people making a fortune off them. Tsiolis is vastly better at this than Gooch ever was. He has played the game superbly and made millions, and is still going strong. There are plenty more people and businesses who want a share of the action. A buyout is still possible if some company sees a way to play it to their advantage. But you should not delude yourself that all these smart people are in it because they see longevity of the business.
iSoftStone are simply a contractor. Read the announcement again:
Netlinkz have given iSoftStone the source code to the product and an instruction to make it better. NET have a lot of money to hand out so iSoftStone took the job and will be paid to do it. There's no mention of any value going the other way. It is not a "partnership," it is just an outsourced software development contract.
China Telecom and Bluetech are just trying to find competitive products. It is about research and experimentation. All big companies do it, trying to find the competitive edge. Remember Telstra? "Why would Telstra be involved if, like you say, it does not work?" you asked me back then. Same answer. I trust you can remember how the Telstra deal ended up? The difference is that China Telecom are driven by the state mandated requirement to find a VPN replacement, and they really want VIN to work. That is the plate Tsiolis is spinning.
>is it possible the actual product(s) that you are familiar with have >been refined/improved?
The current version of the connection client is 3.0.6, from February this year. As far as I can tell, it is the same as the communications product iWebGate put in front of me in 2014. The user interface has obviously been rewritten for the Chinese market, but the underlying communications program (they call it 'peer') is almost exactly the same. Same features, same configuration, same interfaces, same everything. They appear to have changed the version number to match the user interface, nothing more.
That, I suspect, is why they have brought iSoftStone in. Netlinkz have no programming skills so to stand any chance of making VIN actually work they need to get some other company in to do the coding. It might still happen. China Telecom badly want it to, NET have pots of money to throw at it, and iSoftStone will gladly take that money. They will have to fundamentally change how that 'peer' code works in order to make it reliable across the open internet, and to allow firewalls to pass that data without reconfiguration. Maybe they will do it, coming up with a new, patentable approach that the likes of Cisco and Google still have not thought of. But the current implementation of VIN is not it.
NET Price at posting:
27.5¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
(20min delay)