Lobbing a big 'ol softball out there for all of the dahua haters to roast them, eh? Ok, I'll bite.
Dahua used to be a decent company when they first brought their products to the US through a handful of distributors, but that all went away starting back in 2010. Plain and simple, they just got greedy. They used to make a sturdy, quality product and listened to feedback and tried to make it better, however something changed and they decided it was now all about money. They started by using cheaper components (just try to guess how many people out there have had to suffer through failed CPU cooling fans) and then seemed to lose some key people and what little service they had went to hell also very quickly. They've always been running a few years behind Hik and follow their playbook like a religious text whether it has worked or not.
Dahua put all of their eggs in the HD-CVI basket thinking that they would take over the world, but with typical chinese non-marketing savvy and the inevitable move to cheaper components after launch, they failed miserably. The biggest example I can think of is their move away from Hisilicon to Grain Media for their processors on some product lines which was a massive failure that continues to haunt everyone today.
Having failed on that front, they decided that the only way they could get more money (noticing a trend yet?) was to cut the throats of the distributors that made them in the US and go direct. "We're only opening a service center in the US, we'll NEVER sell direct", hmmm, remember Hik opening in Texas years ago singing the same song? Sales on Amazon and eBay and the like were always played off as Shezhen company "grey market" distributors who were counterfeiters and they even said at one point that any product found on Amazon or eBay that had the dahua name on it was NOT their true product. Now they try to sell whatever they can, wherever and however they can no matter who suffers (the consumers, installers, distributors or anybody except their banker). They have come straight out and said "We want to eliminate the entire installer/distributor layer of the market and sell direct to everyone".
They are dishonest and the product they sell becomes cheaper, less reliable and worse day by day. They care nothing for security, they take no responsibility for the Mirai situation, "that was all caused by poor installers and distributors who didn't know what they were doing and wasn't even true dahua product anyway, it was OEM stuff". They deserve to fail, having burned every bridge built by US (and other countries) companies who wanted to help them succeed so everyone could profit so that they could stuff their own pockets in order to continue their wannabe Hikvision existence.
