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Inside Factory China
blackbearnh writes "While China is attempting to pull its industry up out of mere manufacturing mode, for now the country is the production workhorse of the consumer electronics industry. Almost anything you pick up at a Best Buy first breathed life across the Pacific Ocean. But what is it like to shepherd a product through the design and production process? Andrew 'bunnie' Huang has done just that with the Chumby, a new Internet appliance. In an interview with O'Reilly Radar, he talks about the logistical and moral issues involved with manufacturing in China, as well as his take on the consumer's right to hack the hardware they purchase."
Put yourself in the Chinese situation. If you had to work months and months and months to save up to buy something for yourself, would you buy the frivolous electronic gadgets you are manufacturing now, or would you work your tail off for something more rewarding like health care, better housing, national defense, or better quality food?
The Chinese economy is undergoing changes to serve its own people now. Factories will be modified to produce goods the Chinese people want, rather than what we want. It won't happen over night, but it's a process that will continue as they shift away from being an export economy.
Link to Chumby page Flash-infested, but interview with creator quite refreshing, for example:
JT: There seems to be a running battle between the users of equipment and the manufacturers, be it jail-broken iPhones or hacked Xboxes. How much control do you think a manufacturer legitimately should be allowed to have over the use of their hardware?
AH: Well, I think that a manufacturer, basically once the hardware leaves the factory, and someone's paid whatever the market price is for it, then the user owns it, right? So I mean you could take that piece of hardware, melt it down and use it for the component metals if you want, use it for a doorstop. You could use it for something completely other than the computer, that you had not imagined it to be used for. So the hardware itself is pretty much -- I kind of believe you buy it, you own it.
I met this guy at a Foo camp party in Beijing, and he gave a presentation on how he reverse engineers Nintendo Wiis. He uses some kind of custom chassis that connects to both sides of the Wii's motherboard and burns off the tops of chips to look at their structure through a microscope. Pretty impressive...
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Let's have China be a giant slave labor pool but then borrow trillions of dollars of them to cover our own increased social welfare costs. Let's face it, the whole concept of trade coming into balance with them is just impossible, will never happen, and the more we trade with them, the more bankrupt we will get. Anyone who seems to think otherwise, please let me know what year it will be that US and China trade will be in balance. What year is that going to be?
This is my sig.
Flying spaghetti monster and all his noodley appendages, just go and read a bloody book or talk to someone or do something other than sit there watching a non-stop stream of the same five websites.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Like the ones he just kind of hand-waves, by repeating 'Oh! It's so much better in the factories than it is outside, you know? And they've tried to fool me by bringing in good food on the days I'm there, you know. And the workers aren't going to tell me how shitty it really might be, because I don't really speak the language and they really don't want to lose their jobs... or get in shit with the mob like this rebuttal suggests might happen. You know.'
I read the article, and the guy uses right, like and whatever an awful lot. I realize it was supposed to read like a conversation, but it was awfully annoying.
It was also quite rambling. I would have loved more detail on the kinds of things he took apart as a kid, or some of the neat things he built with his 200 in 1 radio shack kit. These are the kinds of comments that inspire future hackers & product designers. But they spent very little time on what he had actually done.
All in all not a bad article, and certainly fodder for additional reading into this guy. I will say that the Chumby is getting some interest in my office. Folks have latched onto it in a "Web 2.0" kind of way, using it as an emblem of what the future of commerce, not just ecommerce, will be in the future.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Gem from the article: "...it's a little bit different in terms of its industrial design. It has a soft leather case and has electronics on the inside. So trying to explain something that the Chinese guys hadn't seen before..." where was teddy ruxpin manufactured again? (I don't honestly know, but it's still a hilarious sentence.)
Now what is interesting about this guy (which applies to manufacturing jobs anywhere) is that he goes and sleeps in the dorm and eats the food. And he even talks about how sometimes they will try to fool him, et cetera. So what he's talking about is personal responsibility for corporate actions. It's not forced on you, although sometimes in China they will execute you for fraud if it's politically expedient...
Here's a painful bit from the article:
I would add that I can't walk through the toy section any more because the smell of offgassing plastic makes me want to puke. I'm not one of the super-sensitive types, or at least I'm not sensitive to everything. And I like toys, I'm not ashamed to admit that I still have a collection of 'em sprinkled around here and there collecting dust. When I start to reenact scenes from Spaceball with them, I'll start accepting snarky comments. Crap, I'll make a webapp for the purpose. I even just got a new LCD TV that my lady chased out of the living room until it stops stinking so badly. I don't think that has to do with inherent disgustingness of electronics so much as Sharp's failure to actually wash them after production to remove residues. I pick on them because I'm staring at their logo under my windows taskbar, but I've been noticing more and more of this as time has gone by, both from name-brands and crap-brands. (As in, when you get one as a present, you say crap. e.g. "Oh crap, it's a Coby." Maybe not out loud, depending on how polite you are.)
Finally, NERD FACTOR NINE:
Seriously, if you don't have a story like this about your nickname, are you really a geek? Definitely +10 geek cred points on that paragraph. Now if they can just lose the ballbag picture frame, maybe they'll have something.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Even if we could assume that by, itself, a scenario of long term debt and eventual bankruptcy would not have terrible consequences for the USA, losing our ability to manufacture for ourselves is corrosive to our society. A slave economy retards technological innovation, undermines scientific achievement and ultimately results in social stagnation. The Romans collapsed as they went more and more into a slave economy, and having an economic reliance on slaves also doomed the old African tribal states, the Muslim states, and then most recently even the old Confederacy. Why invest millions into building machinery, when you can just add more slaves to your mix without any real capital cost at all? In that sense, slavery and a destruction of worker's rights is not just evil, its stupid.
This is my sig.
IRONY: A long, dense, unbroken paragraph about the importance of editing for readability.
Read my blog.