Tudor Brown, the former president of UK chip-designer Arm, has warned against the sale of the company. There has been speculation current owner Softbank will sell it to Nvidia. Mr. Brown voiced his opposition to such a move in an interview with BBC News.
“I have always believed the Softbank investment and focus on growth was ill-advised, and I think Softbank is coming to accept that now,” Mr Brown told the BBC. “[But] it would be very bad news for ARM to be sold to any semiconductor company. “The company should be slimmed down and kept independent to serve the industry from a profitable position of neutrality.” ARM creates computer-chip designs that others then customise to their own ends. It also develops instruction sets, which define how software controls processors.
Check It Out: Former Arm President Warns Against Sale
Charlotte:
Tudor Brown’s position, as exemplified by his comment, “The company should be slimmed down and kept independent to serve the industry from a profitable position of neutrality”, precisely underscores how bad an idea, let alone a move, on Apple’s part a bid to purchase ARM IP from Softbank would have been.
In this current climate of increased scrutiny of big tech by the world’s legislative and regulatory bodies, principally driven by anticompetitive behaviours by the surveillance capitalists, and sadly less by their abusive and negligent treatment of user data, Apple would have found themselves in the eye of a storm of anticompetitive complaint and litigation before the virtual ink had dried on those rights having been signed over. And, no doubt, those complaints would have been accompanied by a chorus of calls for Apple to be broken up, and not simply along the fault line of the ARM acquisition, but of their services, hardware and software product as well; a single offering amongst these, like Apple Music, being larger than many successful businesses.
TC would have been held up to posterity as an object lesson of how not to run a global enterprise, specifically what types of acquisitions not to make, when things were otherwise going so well.
Not an enviable legacy.