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Comment by QUINTUSPUBLIUS | Hacker News Reader

FTFA:

"After he left, 40 of the 800 engineers he worked with immediately joined him at Zoom.

And according to this tweet, almost all of the others sent in resumes to work with him. He had something like 1000 job inquiries within a week of announcing his leaving.

Talk about engineering loyalty."

No, let's talk about Intellectual property(IP):

How much does Zoom's software differ from Cisco/Webex? If Yuan got 40 developers overnight from Cisco/Webex and more later, how much IP did they bring to Zoom from Cisco/Webex? Should Cisco/Webex sue Zoom for IP theft? I don't see how such a lawsuit could fail.

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> How much does Zoom's software differ from Cisco/Webex?

It's been 9 years, so I would guess quite a lot.

> Should Cisco/Webex sue Zoom for IP theft?

I mean they probably could, but this is more of an employee retention problem. If Cisco had not mismanaged the engineering department (And if they had not mismanaged the engineering department, then why did ±1000 engineers decide to leave for a competitor within a week), they would have been able to build the software in the way they seemed to feel they could at Zoom. This is Cisco's fault.

What's the point of having intellectual property if it is very clearly inferior to that of a brand new startup with a lot of the same engineers? How much is that IP worth if a significant number of your employees decide to leave to work on a product in the same space, because you can't do it right?

says>"How much is that IP worth if a significant number of your employees decide to leave to work on a product in the same space, because you can't do it right?"

Let me rephrase that for you (with a mind toward a court case):

" How much is that IP worth if a significant number of your employees decide to leave to work on a product in the same space, because, while working for Cisco/Webex, they worked out all the bugs and now know how to write the software right?"

Nail in the fscking coffin, Dude! Cisco is going to own Zoom (literally and figuratively).

Cisco have had nine years to own Zoom for this IP theft you allege. It's not going to happen.

> because, while working for Cisco/Webex, they worked out all the bugs and now know how to write the software right?

Well they obviously weren't given room by Cisco to fix the bugs, or there wouldn't be any. Or they didn't have room to start afresh amid technical debt.

In any case, I think the developers would probably not be foolish enough to use techniques that they had used at Cisco?

The absence of Cisco winning infringement lawsuits or settlements with Zoom would suggest there was no IP theft.

Many founders split from established companies because the established company disregard or dismiss their product ideas.

An idea is not IP.

WebEx sucked. So this seems to be a silly question.

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