Ironically it may not be a "rebadge" in the sense of 100% turnkey solution like waveace, but you can buy the same scope with the LeCroy badge or Siglent badge and it makes quality-conscious people wary. Regardless of who's SW is in it, how partnerships are supposed to work, or how past partnerships have worked.
Then I guess you will never buy a car because all cars are more or less designed that way. Or travelling by train or airplane.
New partnerships are often perceived as a new company with a mix of the two companies strengths, weaknesses and the unknown wildcard of how well it all worked in the end. They just need substantial service time behind the product with a favorable outcome.
Not really. It's not that Siglent and LeCroy have founded a new company (SigCroy?) they both operate together. All they do is sharing product responsibilities and dividing certain design aspects amongst them. Happens all the time in many industries, probably much more than you're aware off.
At the end of the day the entity that sticks its name on the finished product is the one who has product responsibility towards the customer.
LeCroy obviously could have avoided this by designing in- house or at least disallowing siglent from selling the identical siglent sds3000 given how easy it is to do a google search. But they saved cost with co-design and apparently do not get a free pass that all is well because of the lecroy name.
Siglent is only allowed to sell the SDS3000 in China (and maybe some other parts of Asia) while LeCroy 'owns' the rest of the global market. It's great that you can find the SDS3000 on Google but you won't get one over legitimate channels outside China, and even if you managed to get one you'd end up with a scope with no warranty which would have cost you around the same as the LeCroy variant which comes with full warranty and long-term support (and a nicer color).
Both parties benefit from this deal. Siglent because they can get their name out in their home market as a vendor offering serious test equipment (which they struggle to do with their own kit), and the "Powered by Teledyne LeCroy" in the lower left corner on the screen signals that they are using technology from one of the leading manufacturers of highend scopes, which raises Siglent's stake. For LeCroy, they have someone who has shown to be capable of designing and producing good hardware, which allows them to offer the WS3k for very low prices in their traditional markets.
The logistics of a co-design are not great for engineering.
Not really. For example, the whole automotive industry is proof that this isn't true, because this industry lives and breathes co-design. Or do you think all parts of your car is made by the company that has their name on the hood?
The same is true for Aerospace as well.
Communication between company a and company b is dictated by nda's that limit IP transfer. NDA's are designed to share just enough info. Never more than needed if lawyers are doing their job. The reason is if you share to much then the company with the more valuable IP (presumably lecroy) may teach the other company trade secrets which will hurt them down the road in the form of competition. If you share to little the product may have issues. So design targets can fall through the cracks or just are not communicated or tested. The concern is real and not unique to these two companies. Time will tell how successful the partnership was. Its the risk you take when you save development costs with co-designs and sell the same scope under different brands.
You're overcomplicating things. There aren't really much secrets in the hardware design of a 4GSa/s scope. Everyone can do that. LeCroy may be able to offer some improvements due to their experience but there isn't much "IP" in these designs. The secret sauce is in the software which Siglent gets as an encrypted binary blob to flash into their scopes.
Agilent had a similar deal with Rigol which they apparently later regreted as it made Rigol stronger as a competitor, but there isn't much risk in it for LeCroy. First, LeCroy has no interest in designing 4GSa/s scopes. Even 15 years ago they already showed Iwatsu how to make 4GSa/s scopes, and at that time these scopes were highend scopes. It didn't hurt them at all, in fact, it reduced their cost base so that LeCroy scopes were often cheaper than comparable scopes from Agilent or Tek.
The good news is LeCroy saved cost and the ws3000 might be a very good scope. It does have lecroy SW in it, albeit with less features than some may expect from higher end lecroy's (ie very limited math capability). But in general it seems to check all the major features a scope of this class should have so is one of several to consider in this price class depending on your needs and likes ( agilent, tek, hameg, etc as well obviously ). The bad news is they might have a hard time getting traction with sales until there are more first-hand reviews for day-to-day usage to convince people to take the plunge. I only saw one on youtube, may be others. The really really bad news would be the hypothetical worst case scenario where siglent did not hold up their end of the deal and hw design is not where it should be.
Again, you're overcomplicating things. There's nothing wrong with Siglent's hardware designs, even the shitty LeCroy WaveAce scopes are shit because of the software (and the price tag for these scopes). LeCroy always kept their fingers on the companies they partnered with, and I have full trust that the hardware of the SDS3000 aka WS3000 is just fine. The part where LeCroy got caught out was the incapability of Siglent to design proper software. However, this has been addressed with the SDS3000 aka WS3000 because the software is pure LeCroy.