Chinese Economics Thread
- Thread starter Norfolk
- Start date
I think that some people, the very notion of China being successful in some forms presents a significant degree of cognitive dissonance and a threat to their perception of how the world should work, so in their eyes to "mitigate" that threat it is only natural to try and present a "balanced" view of what their perception of "reality" actually "is".
This isn't particularly new, and if anything it will likely increase in intensity in the foreseeable future as progress must inevitably be "balanced" with "negatives" to present an "unbiased" opinion.
Equation
Lieutenant General
US Makers and 3D printers are massively inferior to China’s manufacturing hubs
| April 27, 2017 |
It is 100 times faster than laser metal sintering machines.
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To illustrate what makes Shenzhen so unique, he shared a story at the 2013 Shanghai Maker Carnival: “I’m in my apartment, in Huaqiangbei, and I get a call early in the morning. My factory is short of transistors. So I get up, walk downstairs, buy 3,000 transistors on the street, walk over to the factory, thread it into the reel on the line, and two hours later, the line’s up and running again.” In another city or situation, he says, your factory would be down for maybe 24 hours. Those 24-hour delays begin to mount and seriously slow delivery of your product.
Matt Mets, former MakerBot engineer and Make: blogger who now lives in Shenzhen and runs Blinkinlabs, offers a colorful analogy that also speaks to Shenzhen’s unique ecosystem: “All of the things we’re building are super-small compared to what the giant companies are making, so we’re sort of clinging to the fur of a much larger animal that is big manufacturing, and that animal lives in southern China.
Shenzhen is where new smartphone can be rapidly designed and changed and then manufactured by the millions.
Yes, manufacturing has a lot of robotics for full production but China is filled with people who worked factory lines and can rapidly lay down perfect commercial grade solders.
A factory or design team can a product like a hoverboard, figure out how it’s made, and start churning out near-identical products or improved versions.
3D printers and maker tools and Tech shop equipment are not full commercial factory grade. They do not have a supply chain that can scale and adapt to supply raw materials or components.
China’s factories have computer controlled machines and robotic assembly lines.
There is also a critical level of unrecorded manufacturing knowledge that permeates everything in China’s manufacturing hubs. A lot of professionals and leaders who are manufacturing and designing and building businesses and products every day.
Just having some good 3D printers and metal printers will not be enough. It is like thinking some highly flexible scripting and automatic coding could replace the software companies of silicon valley.
Replacing or seriously displacing a manufacturing hub will take scale and decades of commitment and a long road and a lot of innovation to catchup and get competitive.
While what the article says is true regarding such an industrial base there is also a "chicken and egg", and a "can't live with it, can't live without it", relationship in the larger environment between this production pool and the lack of intellectual property protection that is a very gray trade off.
At the same time I find the environment in the US to be extremely misguided from another angle, when patent regulations were changed some years ago to favor first-to-file instead of first-to-invent as it was before. This favors more money i.e. large corporations, and lawyers lawyers lawyers, over individuals to the extent that it is a virtual death knell for individual inventors. This basically ended tinkering as a meaningful hobby for me.
solarz
Brigadier
Funnily enough, the same thing happens in China with regards to software apps, except it happens because of a lack of IP protection. Chinese start-ups no longer tries any kind of innovation because anything they create, the big guys like Baidu and Tencent can replicate in days, if not hours.
It just goes to show that in the information age, we need a new kind of system for encouraging innovation. IMO, open-source collaboration is the way forward. Instead of people benefiting from owning an IP, they would benefit by being respected and influential in a collaborative project.
Individuals or small companies should still be able to profit from their innovations though. While respect and influence are great they don't pay the bills.
In terms of software features being copied that's also true in the US such as with the Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat back and forth. Even Android, iOS, Windows features. Or some of the iPhone vs Samsung smartphone patents. It's a blurry line of not reinventing the wheel, form follows function versus intellectual property.
solarz
Brigadier
Most software these days do not make money directly. Instead, they are launching pads for other sources of revenue.
For example, Microsoft makes a lot of money on training courses and certification for its SQL Server, far more than what they would make from licensing alone.
So if you are an influential figure in a popular application, and assuming that this is an enterprise application that requires training to use properly, a lot of people would sign up for your training courses.
Or you could leverage the application to promote your other business. Or if the software really takes off, your company could find itself in the position of dictating new standards in the industry. There are lots of ways to translate influence and prestige into revenue.
nice article and good read. if Saudi Arabia does what he suggests in this article then that's the day they get ''regime changed''.