Siemens Ag ("Siemens") - Cmp - Federal Trade Commission: Fill & Download for Free

Train and subway rides.Here is Moscow urban rail - quiet trains made by Siemens, with air conditioning, free Wifi, bike racks and toilets. And you can pay for the ride with Apple Pay if you’d likeUnderground lines are also air conditioned and have free WiFi and cell coverage. Fare is flat $0.5, service interruptions are rare. Train intervals are as low as 90 seconds on rush hours.And stations are stunning:Now compare that to Amtrak or NY subway.

In my opinion the most sophisticated crime ever committed is Stuxnet. Although it may have been sanctioned by the US or other Governments, it was certainly illegal in the target country. Its ultimate goal was to stealthily end Iran's nuclear weapon development program. In order to do that, it had to infect pretty much every computer and electronic device around the world.Once the virus was released it began jumping from infected system to infected system until it eventually found the Siemens Step7 software that drives the centrifuges used in Iran's program. In all other systems, it simply sits there dormant and non-threatening. But in the Siemens centrifuges, it accelerated them until they burned themselves out and destroyed their systems. The really insidious component of this process was that it sent signals to the control panel that indicated the systems were functioning properly. Therefore, even while their systems were burning out, no one knew they were under attack.Based on the scope of the viral infection and the sophistication of the attack, I believe Stuxnet is the most sophisticated crime ever committed-- albeit for a good cause.​

I work in the IT department of a German-owned company. I use a lot of German software, both commercial and developed in-house. There is one thing that you can say about German software: it is absolutely rock-solid, bullet-proof-reliable. It is amazing.So, why aren’t they on top? I’ll let you in on the secret.An IT colleague spent several years in Germany. Americans were sometimes stereotyped as “cowboys.” He wasn’t sure the precise meaning of the metaphor (after all, cowboys are heroes in American culture). They explained, “Oh, you Americans are like cowboys that walk into a room and just start shooting everywhere.”He replied, “Well, if we’re like cowboys, you guys are like snipers. You meticulously plan your mission, and then stalk for days to get to the target, only to find the target has moved on.”And that reflects the reality. German software development cycles are careful, deliberate, well-planned and well-tested; this approach does not work well with a “moving target.” That approach takes time, so you can’t have rapid product evolution. It’s also expensive, because you aren’t using your user community as your beta-testers, just throwing out whatever sloppy code you banged out the night before. This extensive in-house testing means the products are also expensive.But functionality is valued over usability; you won’t find a whole lot of time/thought put into the user interface; users are just expected to comply with the perfectly-functional design (even though the menus suck). And the people who are buying the software are not the people who will be using it.This German approach does not lend itself to the market demands of consumer-oriented software (and certainly not to mobile devices). And, consequently, consumer-oriented software does not share Germany’s reputation for stability and reliability.German software development lends itself better to software products used in, say, industry, energy, healthcare, and infrastructure. Such as Siemens, a German company with worldwide usage in large stable corporate environments that do not undergo rapid change. You might even have seen a Siemens logo on various pieces of equipment the last time you visited a hospital. But you won’t find Siemens software running on your typical consumer laptop. (FWIW, my German colleagues use Siemens-branded laptops, which run Windows.) I’m not allowed to tell you if we run SUSE Linux (a German Linux operating system) on any servers, but it’s what I use at home.The nature of German software development will relegate most of it to niche markets which value stability and reliability more highly than most consumers do. That’s not a bad thing; German software fulfills a legitimate and important need, and those companies make a nice profit.