All this codswallop about rigol suffering is amazing. They will gain sales from from people who had not heard of them the same as the music industry gained from ripoffs.People complain about fake copies of name brands,they say look at all the sales they missed out on, almost none of the buyers of the ripoff would buy the expensive product, in fact they may even increase sales of the real product, more people see item, think it is real and buy a real one.In the case of music, increased market cover caused increased sales of legitimate copies.
I noticed that years ago with the Sony playstation, While it wasn't straightforward to pirate games, many went to the effort to get and fit modchips, patches etc to copy games, and with a bit of research and time, it could be done.
I wondered at the time if this was one of the reasons that the playstation became so popular, and at the time put it to number 1 in the market.
I never had one myself, but a many friends / or their kids had them, and one of the main reasons they chose them was that the games were copyable and there were plenty of them.
As for Rigol, In my opinion, selling a very affordable, excellent features, 50MHZ scope and "getting it out there", into the hands of many people who previously had to pay around $2000 for a similar unit, has got them a good reputation, and lots of positive publicity by word of mouth, and electronics blogs. I for one would now certainly consider Rigol for higher end gear purchases now, based on my experience with the 50MHZ unit.
It wouldn't surprise me if the 100MHZ hack, pushes their popularity even higher, and win over some of those considering buying other brands - specially when people think they are "getting something extra for nothing".
The old adage is still true - there is no such thing as bad publicity ! Rigol cannot be losing any sales over the attention they have been getting from the 100MHz hack promoted but not originating with our esteemed eev blogger David L. Jones. If you step back and look at it objectively, there has been an enormous amount of NG traffic generated over a fairly trivial subject. And if Rigol are reading this, which they probably are, it would make me more likely to buy one of your DSOs, not less. Rigol could really get some kudos by opening up their source code like Linux, but that might be a bit too radical, even for a Chinese company.
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