Put yourself in FTDI's shoes... It's a bold move, but I understand exactly why they did it.
What makes you think FTDI haven't already been trying to fight the cloners from the supplying end already?
FTDI enjoys a decent premium over the knockoffs and similar products due to brand recognition. Do you think they are going to piss away all that potential money just because some chinese cloners started selling counterfeit product?
Buying fake chips has ALWAYS been a bad deal for everybody involved.
It's the same naive approach the music industry tried, and failed, to use against piracy. Punishing the "pirates" doesn't accomplish anything. Clones will always exist, and this is a market they are not directly competing with, as the people buying the cloned chips are mostly not, and never will be, FTDI customers. Yes, this will hurt the market for cheap FTDI cables, but rather than move to expensive legitimate cables, they are destroying their brand and making them un-purchaseable for anyone, including design engineers, due to the risk of their device or product randomly failing in the future.
If FTDI were an end user products company I
might see them have a bit more success, as those purchasing fake FTDI gadgets would likely know they're fake, like the Gucci handbags you buy in Bangkok. However they're not. They sell chips to integrators and many other vendors. Now they've burned their direct customer, the integrator, as well as the end user. It's a stupid response and will get them no goodwill from anyone, including their legitimate customers, who weren't harmed by the clones in the first place.
They could have done a few different things to reinforce their brand and undermine the clone's reputation without pulling the trigger on millions of devices. Microsoft learned this years ago.
I mean I understand they're butthurt about this, but taking it out on the end user, when they don't even sell to the end user, is not a productive response and will certainly hurt their image, while it never stood any chance of helping it.