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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SilentZ who wrote (217913)	2/7/2005 12:42:47 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577883

"I remember that worry; I didn't know how it came about" It is a matter of appearances and possibility of conflict of interest. Imagine if Clinton had gone to China two weeks after he left office and gave speeches on how China was the next world power? There would have been a special prosecutor appointed within minutes... Part of it was reality based, the other was hype. During the '70s and '80s our industrial base was collapsing and being outsourced, mainly to Japan. Steel, ship building and the auto industry was either severely wounded or completely dead. They were making gains in the electronics industry and there were those claiming that because of Japanese attention to detail, our software industry was about to be overwhelmed by superior Japanese software. There was a lot of concern that Japan was the only supplier of key electronic components for our military. And that book from the founder of Sony called "The Japan That Can Say No" didn't help matters any. Of course, that was back in the days where Japanese workers worked longer hours and took less vacation than American workers did. How times have changed. There was such a mixture of real and imagined concerns that is was hard to sort out at the time. The US auto industry had gotten complacent, quality was all shot to hell. In the favor of the Japanese, they had taken Deming to heart way back in the 1950s and realized that it was cheaper to build in quality from the beginning and not inspect for it at the end. Seems obvious now, but... OTOH, the Japanese never really got the hang of the points that Deming made about making the actual workers part of the overall quality process, continually soliciting input to improve the process. And the concerns over software was over blown. At that time, and even today, about the only Japanese software Americans encountered was either in game consoles or in things like blenders. There was exactly zero in the way of large scale software that we dominated then and now. It's a little different between having one guy developing code for a blender, and managing a team that results in, say, Windows XP. Not that I think Microsoft is all that great, but there hasn't been any evidence that Japan could do even that well. Having worked pretty intimately with Japanese developed code for printers, I doubt that all the claims for quality either. The coding techniques were straight out of the mid-70s Jolt fueled cowboy coding sessions. There wasn't any sign of methodical, software engineering to be seen. So why does Japan only dominate in anime fan boy imagination now? One factor is related to why the Soviet Union fell. We are much more flexible. For all their prowess, Japan has trouble adapting to changes. A large part of the reason is how closely the government and industry works together. When their bubble economy burst in the late 1980s, they tried to make a soft landing, which didn't work. Instead of letting those companies that couldn't survive down size or die, they propped them up. So their economy would struggle, stagger up a little, collapse. Struggle, stagger, collapse. Rinse and repeat. And, of course, it is all the fault of the US because we are racist. Which, coming from Japan, is really the kettle calling the pot black...