“The War Between Huawei and Apple: A Convoluted System of Networks”
Article Link:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/26/tech/huawei-futurewei-us-future/index.html
In the CNN article titled “Huawei was Poised to Fight Apple in the US. Now its Fate is Uncertain” the author, Clare Duffy, discusses Huawei’s attempts to utilize the United States global market in order to gain a larger technological following. Huawei, which is based in China, is determined to expand its smartphone commerce by competing with the Apple iPhone in the United States. According to Duffy, Huawei, “the world’s largest telecom provider and second-largest smartphone seller” is using Futurewei, Huawei’s “US research and development outpost” to invest in rising research and development organizations. This technique allows Huawei to utilize United States technological resources to gain insight on innovations that are gaining momentum in the field of tech. Unfortunately for Futurewei, the White House has made it difficult for the company to maintain American influence by banning the company from transporting tech machinery to other countries. The company is also barred from “buying parts from important US suppliers, such as [Google and Intel].” Due to this, Huawei now has limited staff, dwindling partnerships, closing branches, and weak ties to the world’s leading technological countries.
Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s senior official, states that the United States and Canada have played a role in the company’s struggles. As a result, the company is currently considering whether or not it would be beneficial to continue investing in American research technologies. On the other hand, Huawei has lost partnerships with several American research universities, due to governmental restrictions. The goal of these partnerships is to create new technologies that have the potential to pave the way for future advancements in the world of tech; this would in turn, help with Huawei’s public exposure. However, as the business continues to lose funds and societal support, it is unclear if Huawei will be able to maintain its title as one of the world’s leading tech innovators.
Perhaps it would be helpful to view Huawei’s situation through the lens of societal network properties. To begin, the Strong Triadic Closure Property suggests that Node A (in this case, Huawei) violates the property if node A has strong ties to nodes B and C and there is no edge between nodes B and C. I have decided to label nodes B and C as Google and Intel, respectively. For this example, it is evident that Huawei has weak ties with both Google and Intel, as it is blocked from doing business with these companies. Google and Intel do work together for research and development, so we can consider the ties between Google and Intel to be strong. Because of this, the Strong Triadic Closure Property is satisfied.
Another one of Huawei’s societal networks can be interpreted by using the Structural Balance Property. According to this property, the edges between every set of 3 nodes has to have 1 or 3 positive edges; a negative edge would represent an enemy or an opposing force, whereas a positive edge would represent a friend or a friendly connection. In this network, node A would represent China (Huawei), while nodes B and C would represent the United States and Canada, respectively. According to the article, China (Huawei) is currently having issues with the US and Canada, so the edges BA and CA would have negative edges. The United States and Canada appear to be friendly, so edge BC would have a positive edge. Luckily, this network satisfies the Structural Balance Property.
Of course, Huawei’s struggles can be depicted through various network systems, but I have chosen to highlight the main networks mentioned throughout the article. During the past few lectures, I found the Strong Triadic Closure Property as well as the Structural Balance Property to be particularly interesting and soon realized that they would be extremely applicable to the subject matter discussed in the text. Furthermore, I would say that I was pretty unfamiliar with the influence of Huawei’s tech innovations prior to reading this article; I had only heard about Huawei in the summer when I visited Portugal and was bombarded with several Huawei advertisements. Overall, I would say that my analysis of this text has helped me further understand the impact of networks on the technological society.
Nice analysis.