I worked on a Hitachi based coal plant in college. The Japanese were the originators of high precision engineering, and it shows. TI's OMAP program is going the same route: pursuing long term, more stable business instead of consumer facing chips. I suspect that wages in Korea are much lower, allowing them to manufacture ripped off designs at a much lower price.
Sony's problem is that they're an engineering driven company in consumer markets. While they often win the spec game, they aren't vertically integrated enough to give the same consumer experience that Apple can. Ars has covered many of their missteps in depth.
I think you'll find one person behind the Japanese focus on quality--and thus their expertise in "high precision engineering". That person was W Edwards Deming.
Deming was involved in the US Army's post-WWII rebuilding of Japan. Specifically, he was a statistician hired to help with Japan's census. His focus on quality control was revolutionary at the time, and his work became adopted throughout corporate Japan. He is seen as the father of Total Quality Management. He laid the foundations for decades of Japanese excellence in quality control in manufacturing and industry.
The problem, of course, is that the rest of the world is now well versed on TQM, and has adopted TQM principles. This is why the average car lasts 100s of thousands of miles today, when such quality was unheard of in the 1960s.
Of course, all of the other aspects mentioned have contributed--rising wages, managers replacing engineers, etc etc. But the root cause of all of this is that their competitive advantage that results from a focus on quality is gone now.
Actually I think Sony would have been (and in part still would be) perfectly vertically integrated. They were big in content, home electronics and hand helds. In the beginning of the last decade they could have hardly asked for a better position to completely dominate the electronics business, the way Apple/Samsung do now - but it was all for nothing. Instead of integrating everything, they just let their divisions keep doing their own thing until it was too late.
Comments
I worked on a Hitachi based coal plant in college. The Japanese were the originators of high precision engineering, and it shows. TI's OMAP program is going the same route: pursuing long term, more stable business instead of consumer facing chips. I suspect that wages in Korea are much lower, allowing them to manufacture ripped off designs at a much lower price.
Sony's problem is that they're an engineering driven company in consumer markets. While they often win the spec game, they aren't vertically integrated enough to give the same consumer experience that Apple can. Ars has covered many of their missteps in depth.
I think you'll find one person behind the Japanese focus on quality--and thus their expertise in "high precision engineering". That person was W Edwards Deming.
Deming was involved in the US Army's post-WWII rebuilding of Japan. Specifically, he was a statistician hired to help with Japan's census. His focus on quality control was revolutionary at the time, and his work became adopted throughout corporate Japan. He is seen as the father of Total Quality Management. He laid the foundations for decades of Japanese excellence in quality control in manufacturing and industry.
The problem, of course, is that the rest of the world is now well versed on TQM, and has adopted TQM principles. This is why the average car lasts 100s of thousands of miles today, when such quality was unheard of in the 1960s.
Of course, all of the other aspects mentioned have contributed--rising wages, managers replacing engineers, etc etc. But the root cause of all of this is that their competitive advantage that results from a focus on quality is gone now.
Actually I think Sony would have been (and in part still would be) perfectly vertically integrated. They were big in content, home electronics and hand helds. In the beginning of the last decade they could have hardly asked for a better position to completely dominate the electronics business, the way Apple/Samsung do now - but it was all for nothing. Instead of integrating everything, they just let their divisions keep doing their own thing until it was too late.
They tried to "vertically integrate". Really hard. Thing is, they hung the hardware on MemoryStick and the software on ATRAC. Oops.
Is that why TI laid off the OMAP6 engineers?
http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/14/3646450/texas-instruments...