3 ms·

How bad was the American stuff?? "Made in china" has always meant garbage in my country.

• bluGill 1y ago
  All over the map. There were a lot of high quality brands that in the 1980s reduced quality trying to compete on price, and those earned a bad reputation over time. There are a lot of brands that remain the same high quality (or more likely better) that they had all along that are still going strong - however those brands do not try to compete on price and now are very expensive. Another thing foreign makers did was be more flexible to needs. Some great brands refused to reduce quality, but they were so focused on quality at low prices that they were not responsible to needs. They started making things in batches which reduced costs but if you want a different model you had to wait for that batch. If you have to order something a year in advance while Taiwan can get it to you in a couple months (including shipping via boat!) for some that mattered. Foreign manufactures often did innovate more as well. Sometimes features on the foreign product were enough better (for some definition of better) as to be important for your needs. Note that for every example above you can find a company in the US that has been doing exactly that "bad thing" and they have survived against foreign competition. Every product is different, with different needs. The real failure is always not recognizing correctly what is the correct path for you. Often there is more than one "correct path" mixed in with the bad, but you can only choose one. Sometimes a competitor choosing one path fills the niche of that path and if you choose the same both of you will fail.