FrozenNorth wrote:
Brian Henderson took a can of maroon spray paint on November 24,
2007
04:06 pm and wrote the following:

On Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:09:52 -0500, "J. Clarke"
wrote:

Uh, you missed their taking over the entire consumer electronics
industry.

Because the Japanese could make a better product for less money,
why
shouldn't they take over the industry? They earned it!

The question you should be asking is why the U.S. completely wasted
their superiority.

Obvious answer, they were reaping in the profits, instead of
spending
some of that money to improve quality and R&D in new technologies.

The big problem was that they were heavily invested in tube technology
and didn't really understand the potential of solid state. The
Japanese, on the other hand, weren't invested in anything, since their
infrastructure was pretty much nonexistant thanks to Slum Clearance
Project B-29, and when they started over they decided to take a chance
on this new solid state stuff. Turned out to be a good gamble for
them.

Wasn't so much that their quality was better as that they could make
things smaller and lighter and that consumed less power. The thing
that _made_ the Japanese electronics industry as a player in the US
consumer market was Sony's little battery-powered TV sets. Just
couldn't do those with tubes. If you took one apart, the build
quality wasn't all that good--the solder joints on mine (I had
occasion to open it up the other day after 30 years or so of
operation) are about like the joints on the first generation of
Chinese video boards that I encountered--hand work, not wave-soldered,
but then at the time hand work was considered by the consumers to be
superior to machine-soldered printed circuits. Wasn't less money
either, those Sony sets cost _more_ than American sets.

--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)