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When I was a kid, Japanese products were visibly cheap and poorly made. American products were also poorly made, but not quite so bad as the Japanese. The qua
by russell 17y ago
When I was a kid, Japanese products were visibly cheap and poorly made. American products were also poorly made, but not quite so bad as the Japanese. The quality gap was relatively easy to overcome. The American electronics manufacturers were not very innovative. When Sony came out with transistor pocket radios, American radios were still table top vacuum tube boxes. When the Japanese captured the TV market with integrated circuits, Zenith was advertising the benefits of hand soldered components. Ampex invented the VCR, but couldnt produce the recording heads needed for the home. The Japanese got their reputation by concentrating in quality on a few key industries. By 1984 HP was refusing American made memory chips, because they were so inferior. That triggered a restructuring of industry that powered the economy for the next 20 years.
Interestingly enough, the Japanese had a similar structure to the Chinese with large companies and lots of subcontractors. However, their motivation was to have the subcontractor absorb employment fluctuations and cost squeezes, not to hide violations of quality standards.
- phoxix2 17y agoWilliam Deming is the reason the Japanese had high quality electronics. American's wouldn't listen to him, the Japanese needed him desperately. Today the Japanese love that man. (While the Americans weren't listening to Deming, Harvard Biz Profs even went as far as to predict that Deming/Japan's love for quality would not be sustainable and its competitive advantage would erode. It turns out they were right, the Koreans are the example of this.)
- ojbyrne 17y agoI don't think I've ever heard of him referred to as William Deming (it took me a second to recognize who you were talking about). I've always heard Edwards Deming or W. Edwards Deming.
- 10ren 17y agoUSA: We need 100,000 integrated circuits, with a defect rate of 1 in 10,000. Can you do that? JPN: Well... that's very difficult. But I think... yes, yes I think we can do it. 6 months later, he returns with a very large box and a very small one JPN: This was much more difficult than we thought, but we managed to modify our processes to obtain the exact defect rate you requested. Here are the defect-free chips. USA: Well, I'm very impressed! To be honest, I didn't think you could do it. But tell me, what's in the small box? JPN: Those are the 10 defects.