J. Clarke said:

Greg G. wrote:

Who is going to buy anything when they have no jobs or income?
WalMart doesn't cut it, everyone can't be an attorney or doctor, and
much of the manual labor "services industry" stuff has been taken over
by immigrant labor - with the tacit assistance of business. Phone
support, computer programming outsourced. IBM has an entire line of
CAD products produced in India.

India? I thought IBM's CAD product was Catia, which is a product of Avions
Marcel Dassault.

Actually, Catia is the IBM line, Dassault Systems is SolidWorks Corp.


Man, things sure were a lot simpler 30 years ago...

The thing is, we can't compete on the world market for stuff that doesn't
require special expertise to make. There isn't any good short term
solution--if we close the borders the rest of the world will do the same and
the market for US goods and services will disappear. Long term we have to
encourage innovation instead of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
In many ways the US is one of the _least_ innovative countries in the
world--look at aerospace--the Russians brought five designes to completion
to our one--yes, our best were and are better than their best, but they were
trying stuff that we weren't. We've been talking about Wing In Ground
Effect for decades, they've been flying them for decades. How about
shipbuilding--why is the fastest ship in the world made in Australia?
Consumer electronics--how is is that the Japanese grasped the concept that
"good enough" consumer video would sell and then brought VHS and Beta to
market, while Ampex, which was technologically capable of doing that as far
back as the '60s, never _tried_ it? And a little Japanese vacuum bottle
that is absolutely brilliant--the inside is exactly sized so that you can
drop a can of soda or beer into it and keep the can cold for hours. Thermos
could have made that at any time during their history so why didn't anybody
think to _try_ it? The thing that put Japanese consumer electronics on the
map wasn't cheap stuff, it was an expensive little 12-inch TV that could run
off the lighter plug in a car--everybody who saw those first little Sonys
was fascinated by them and the US electronics industry had _nothing_ like
that. Even stupid little bric-a-brac--I've got a set of little LED lights
that stick to your fingertips with rubber bands that are good for
light-painting and make a fun stocking stuffer (unfortunately the rubber
bands that come with them suck but rubber bands aren't hard to find) that
some US company could have been making ages ago.

I've owned some of the things you mention. Large Corporate operations
seem very slow to consider anything out of their already saturated
markets, they have no imagination and are unwilling to take risks.

Can you imagine a car like the Chevy Corvair being produced in this
day and age? For a major US manufacturer, first Unibody, first
turbocharger, first transaxle, first aluminum block/head, first air
cooled horizontally opposed six, independent 4-link suspension ('65
and later), etc. They attacked the market penetration of the likes of
Renault and VW while Ford produce the Falcon which primarily cut into
their own sales of larger sedans. Regardless of what you think about
the car, it made money, and still has aficionados around the world.
The engine is still sought after for airplanes, dune buggies, and
generators. Silly example, perhaps, but an indication of how little
real innovation has occurred since.

And you're right about the VCRs. I owned an Ampex open reel video
recorder back in the early 70s - B&W piece of ****. But it had all the
requisite technology - helical scan, linear sound track, and was sort
of portable. Marketers didn't feel there was a consumer demand and
failed to engineer a compact, easy to use version. They also had
studios and producers wailing in their ears about possible copyright
violations. The Japanese didn't care about all that, certainly did
forge ahead producing tons of VCRs. And TVs, radios, walkmans/discmans
and such.

Timidity is not a survival trait.

I don't know why this is the case--just that it is. We don't encourage
companies to bring high-risk products to market, we don't encourage basic
research, we don't encourage applied research, and we keep moaning and
groaning about how other countries do a better job of "science education"
while most people who graduate with technical degrees end up either teaching
school or doing something unrelated to their degree.

See? ;-) As for the engineers, many probably got sick of the status
quo and general backbiting. ladder climbing corporate crap.

And then there's general incompetence--I remember the materials people at
Enormous Aerospace telling us that we couldn't use this or that or the other
because it made seals swell--one day somebody asked the materials guy why we
cared if it made seals swell, and he replied "because it indicates that
there is something going on that could potentially degrade the seal".
Wasn't until I had left that industry that I found out that the tests the
idiots were using came from the automotive industry and the purpose of the
test wasn't to find out _if_ the seals swell but to make sure that they
swelled by the _right_ _amount_ and that all the stuff that the idiots had
been telling us that we couldn't use made the seals swell because it was
_supposed_ to make the seals swell. But it's not just big business--I used
to work for a woman who had visions of becoming a software vendor--the
trouble is that she didn't know squat about the computer industry or about
software and she thought that she could play for cheap with something that
had started out as a simple little program to do one stupid thing, and grown
into an unmaintainable monster by adding this feature and that feature and
the other feature until it was a few hundred thousand lines of code.

We resemble that remark. ;-) But I hear what you are saying.
Actually, I go through a rewrite of our code, compartmentalizing and
removing any redundant code every few months. But added features are
what keeps a product competitive. Bells and whistles sell. Compare
AutoCAD and SolidWorks or SolidEdge or... Light years apart. AutoDesk
did come out with Inventor, but market share had been lost at that
point and competition was aggressive. It's hard to move an installed
base from one system to another once training has been done.

Sorry for the rant.

No worries, mate. Been there, done that...


Greg G.