Why Hardware Development Takes Longer in the West Than in China (Video)

This was originally going to be a second video about the Popup Factory Demo we talked about last Wednesday. But this section of Tim's lengthy interview with people from the Popup Factory seemed like it would be of broader interest to Slashdot people -- and your coworkers, bosses, and friends who may be involved in device production or prototyping. There are some hard words here, because David Cranor is talking about problems that go way beyond the usual perceived Chinese advantages such as low labor costs and a lack of environmental regulations.

Comments

Re:no duh

[MountainLogic]

If you're in Shenzhen you can take a walk and pick up all the components you need for your prototype project in the morning and assemble them in the afternoon.

The poster is more right on than the off hand language might suggest. Working with Chinese vendors has taught me that they are business people first and engineers second. Just the opposite of most US start-ups. Several times I have been chatting with a Taiwanese/mainland vendors, when I incidentally mention a design/manufacturing/supply problem only to have them say that they have a [brother|cousin|friend|associate] who can sell me a solution. While I've often found that these referrals were off the mark or just a ploy to get a commission they have taught me that in China folks do build and maintain relationships. In the US there is a whole industry of head hunters just to get resumes to HR departments because far too many US engineers fail to build those networks to keep themselves employed. Conversely, there are places where China fails miserable. Theses weak points include design innovation, marketing, prototyping and importing (importing into China - good luck getting parts/tools quickly through customs and into China). A number of times I've seen Chinese contract manufacturers ask US customers to supply partial or full prototype parts for pilot production runs because they lack the infrastructure to work in short runs nearly as fast as a US company can have made in the US. Shenzhen and Taiwan are indeed unique manufacturing clusters much as San Jose is for development and Detroit used to be for automotive. The US need to nurture and regrow our manufacturing base to remake our manufacturing clusters.