BREXIT - what comes next?

alexx:

AHitman:

In somewhat related news:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36822806

"UK technology firm ARM Holdings is to be bought by Japan's Softbank for £24bn ($32bn) it confirmed on Monday"

I'm sure the exchange rate changes helped with this decision, I wonder how many other British companies will be sold off in the coming months?

Just the other day I was discussing with someone, what the British made that the world was still buying - other than financial services. I couldn't think of a single thing that I had purchased in recent years that was British. But then I remembered I had an ARM cpu in my smartphone.

While they didn't make the chips, ARM Holdings was still British and a lot of design work is still done in the UK (and it appears that might continue).

I'm pretty sure there must have been negotiations going on for some time, but the lower GBP would have helped finalise the deal.

ARM didn't make chips because on the whole the UK didn't make chips ... they certainly had to do deals with Europe, the US, Japan, and later Korea to make Robin Saxby's brilliant partnership business model work. They aren't very British in that way because Robin didn't just think global, he was global. So you haven't really bought British in that sense either ...

On top of that, ARM took quite a lot of EEC funding in the early years, that certainly facilitated quite a lot of the early growth and exposed the EEC to the architecture and the ARM architects to more of the world. So they weren't very Brexit either ... in fact the exact opposite, they were partially EEC funded.

Being independent (i.e. not owned by a Japanese bank or fabbing its own silicon) allowed ARM to try and do the "right thing" to create a global standard through collaboration and not competition, which was a very un-British thing to do back then, and I guess still is, given the recent referendum.

Lastly, the early ARM implementations, wholly designed by the British, were pretty much a flop. ARM7DM was the first chip to gain real licensing traction, ARM7TDMI was a huge success (it and its direct descendants are still around 75% of ARM total shipments), and both were invented by a Kiwi from Christchurch. The first Floating Point unit from ARM UK was a disaster, as was the ARM8 family. ARM9 was a complete rip off of the StrongARM datapath, which was designed by Digital in Austin (the ripping off done by that same Kiwi), and all the A series chips in your phone were designed in either Austin in Texas, or Sophia in France. The VFP Floating Point unit and Memory Management in your phone were first developed in Austin, by the team headed by said Kiwi again. And of course the Mali GPU family all came from Norway. The AMBA bus was certainly developed by ARM in the UK, but as part of an EEC project to make it an open standard. All the other early Acorn IP, VIDC, IOC and MEMC pretty much died solely because the AMBA bus allowed silicon partners to hang their own peripherals off the CPU and differentiate themselves.

The curious thing about hiring Kiwi in the UK in 1991? ARM had to jump through all sorts of stupid immigration hoops (for example I had to go to Paris for the day because I couldn't actually be in the UK when my application was filed), such that for a small company it was a big deal and might never have happened ... I wonder if Brexit will allow that sort of so-called border control to fester once again, and limit how startup companies like ARM might tap the best people for the best roiles, no matter where they might reside.

So overall ARM is about as British as the summit of Mount Everest in 1953 :-) The Brits will contend this hotly (except Robin), but that's exactly the mentality that got them into this mess ... and certainly not the mentatlity that made ARM so successful.

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