Mannerisms

There is apparently outrage among the nutters that Muslims could own a chunk of a US technology company.

It is tempting to laugh at the nutters, but they can cause mmense aggravation in terms of lost time and expense, as ASML of Holland found out when it bought the US stepper/scanner company Silicon Valley Group (SVG) in October 2000.

The CEO of ASML at the time, Doug Dunn, recalls the furore.

“There was a band of strange people trying to protect the US from any form of foreign interest of getting into the US”, remembers Dunn, “these were people with a Fortress America mentality and there were some strange organisations, some with roots in the cotton industry, originally formed to repel cheap imports from India, who were against any form of foreign competition and would try and dress it up in national security issues.”

“They were a band of strange fellows shooting 20 minute videos and sending them to senators and congressmen saying how we were foreigners that we were in league with communists and would supply all the technology to China”, recounts Dunn, “they were playing to populist hysteria. Genuine issues were muddied by unjustified half truths - distorted by external influences with a paranoid focus on protectionism and parochialism. It cost us a lot of time and money.”

Eventually the glitterati of US high-tech industry, including the CEOs of all the Sematech companies, went down to Washington and told the anti-trust hearing into the ASM-SVG merger that US national interests were not threatened by the deal, and that US industry would benefit from the takeover.