chines manufacturing, was Re: Wipro's Azim Premji [....]

[cdevers at pobox.com (Chris Devers)]

On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Bob Keyes wrote:

> [long rant(s) on inferior quality of Asian products]

Neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but this may be of interest:

    Within 10 to 20 years the Chinese will be able to sell a car that
    is very similar to today's rental car:B B 4 doors, 4 seats, air
    conditioner, radio, new but not fancy. It will cost between $2000
    and $3000 in today's dollars. With cars that cheap it will be
    unthinkable to manufacture in the U.S. Consumers won't bother to
    finance a $2000 purchase separately (maybe they'll add it to their
    credit card debt). Drivers will still carry liability insurance
    but won't bother with collision or theft coverage. With cars that
    cheap it won't make sense to advertise. If Ford or Toyota tried
    to sell the average person a $25,000 car they would simply laugh,
    much as a Walmart shopper would think you're crazy if you tried
    to persuade him to spend $2,000 on a TV. 

<http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/06/20#a463>

The above quote is, of course, taken out of context. 

Basically, Greenspun's argument is that 40 years ago, televisions were big
expensive things that pwoople would take out a loan to purchase and were
too valuable not to repair if they ever had problems. Further, he argues,
TVs were a status symbol, and people identified on some level as RCA
owners or Zenith owners, just as some people today are Ford or Honda types
(or Dell or Compaq, say).

Today, by contrast, big TVs of reasonably good quality -- not great, but
not awful either -- can be had so cheaply that there's no need to finance
the purchase and there's little motivation to replace a broken one when a
new one would be cheaper and probably better. Moreover, while there is a
small segment of the market buying multi-thousand dollar high end TVs, the
vast majority of consumers have long since moved on to the cheap stuff.

He doesn't need to spell out the fact that the same situation applies to
most consumer electronics, not the least of which being computers. 

Greenspun then extrapolates from there to a world not long from now, when
the Chinese are able to build cars with the same economics, and from there
to the effects that a vast supply of cheap cars could have on the broader
US economy.



So, what does this say about the IT situation today? 


Is superior quality enough to keep the status quo, or is "worse better"?

Quoting <http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1291919&lastnode_id=124>: 

    A controversial precept of software engineering design, first
    articulated under this name by Richard Gabriel in a talk and
    paper presented at the EuroPAL conference in 1989 called "Lisp: 
    Good News / Bad News / How to Win Big". (Gabriel has since
    written several other essays arguing alternately for and against
    the idea; see his website at www.dreamsongs.com for details.) 

    The original essay compares and contrasts two schools of thought: 
    The "MIT/Stanford" approach to software design and the "New Jersey" 
    or "Worse is better" approach. The key contrast is that the
    MIT/Stanford school insists that a design be maximally correct,
    consistent, and complete even if it ends up being a little more
    complex than you'd like it, while the New Jersey / worse-is-better
    school values simplicity above all else, even if it means that a
    design is mildly incomplete or inconsistent, or even slightly
    incorrect. 

Cf. also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better>

I don't know how things will go down, but I do know of plenty of real life
examples of a technology that was worse than a competitor and yet still
managed to overwhelm the market in the long run: Windows vs. Macintosh,
VHS vs. Betamax, CDMA vs. GSM, etc. 

With the current evolution of the American & European vs. Chinese & Indian
economies, we may be seeing this "worse is better" concept playing out not
just with indivual microeconomic companies & industries, but with the
entire landscape of national & internation economies. And from what I can
see, it's a good idea not to bet against the "worse" side coming out on
top in these pairings.


I wish I could see a happy ending for us, but I can't think of one.



-- 
Chris Devers