23 Sep
2011
23 Sep
'11
5:01 p.m.
On 23/09/11 10:53 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
It's interesting. If W. Edwards Deming was
responsible for the rise
of Japanese industry, who holds the philosophy behind China's rise?
Thomas Hobbes?
It seems that one can concentrate on quality and
succeed, and also
that one can not give a fig about quality and succeed by producing
junk.
Except it isn't "success" - in particular, it's not sustainable.
It's
actually profound failure, but not the kind that is felt by everyone
right away; large parts of Western society are already suffering, and so
are those Chinese on the wrong side of the wedge.
So who's got the right idea? By all that Deming
held sacred, the
huge enterprises built on the back of cheap labor and adversarial
monetary policy shouldn't exist. Yet there they are, manufacturing
short-lived garbage.
...
So will we see the same thing in computers? You know, the Toyota
Celica of PCs that will easily put in 20 years of service? It's hard
to see that happening.
Plenty of computers have working lives of 10 or more years. To get
20-year working lives you need:
* Better user education as to what is a fixable problem and what isn't
(e.g. many people throw away computers if Windows "gets slow", or the
hard drive or PSU dies);
* make sure developers are working (or at least TESTING) on 5+ year
old hardware.
Making it simply unaffordable to build or buy throw-away stuff, and
having design-for-repair again (as computers used to be) would be icing
on the cake.
--T
Or will computers be like chewing gum--use it
once and throw it away?
--Chuck