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| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| Asia Times: The murder of US manufacturing |
| 2008-06-18 |
| Many agree with this analysis - visit the link.. [..] To see how this happened, think back to the 1950s. Electric appliances were the major growth business of that decade, symbolizing the decade's new affluence. Forecasters confidently predicted that by 2000 robot appliances would be in every household, removing the drudgery of housework once and for all. As a youthful reader of Isaac Asimov's Robot stories I shared that confidence - after all, the computerization necessary for robot control systems, which had not existed in 1940 when Asimov wrote the first of his I Robot short stories, was already revolutionizing business management by the late 1950s. Now it's not just 2000 but 2008. So where the hell are the robots? GE Appliances has no such offering; if you buy a GE vacuum cleaner you will still have do all the work yourself. Can it be that the technological optimism of the 1950s was misplaced, and that home robots will never exist, or will be invented only in the far distant future? You'd certainly think so from looking at GE's catalog of products. However it turns out that GE is simply behind the curve. The iRobot Corporation of Bedford Massachusetts, founded by keen Asimov readers from MIT in 1990, manufactures fully robotized vacuum cleaners as well as some pretty neat robotized mine-clearing equipment for the military. iRobot's standard model runs around $300, less in real terms than an ordinary vacuum cleaner would have cost you in 1980. iRobot's total sales are only $250 million, which GE would no doubt class as a rounding error, but dammit, the company doesn't have GE's brand name or distribution network. Had GE had the sense and innovative skill to develop robot vacuum cleaners, can anybody doubt that that product group's sales would today be several billion dollars, with appropriately high margins? It is thus clear that by starving GE Appliances of investment and, more important, of research dollars, and devoting the company's efforts to financial services, "Neutron Jack" and his cohorts have deprived the United States of a major new business and deprived us overworked consumers of a major labor-saving technology (unless we are lucky enough to find out about iRobot or its few small-company competitors). GE has commoditized its appliance business, forcing down prices by manufacturing in ever cheaper-labor parts of the world. Instead it should have been enriching that business, opening up new opportunities for products that could be sold at higher prices and higher margins and provide more value to the consumer. The sad story of GE Appliances is a paradigm of what has gone wrong in the US economy since 1980. No, manufacturing did not need to leave the United States; US manufacturing was killed by a multitude of foolish short-term-profit motivated decisions by inept and overpaid US management. [..] |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #2 where the hell are the flying cars. We were promised flying cars! |
| Posted by: Frank G 2008-06-18 17:35 |
| #1 I'm confused. iRobot is an American company, and the profits stay here. Even if the machines are currently made in China -- which I don't know, one way or the other -- that is easily changed. After all, even Chinese companies are now moving their manufacturing elsewhere as labour costs go up. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-06-18 17:00 |