[GTALUG] war story: fixing an LCD TV

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Don Tai via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| I don't think you can get a TV or monitor that is not made in China, but
| someone please tell me I'm wrong.

Sharp had Japanese factories.  They had Mexican factories.  Those are
places that the old TV might have been manufactured.

The more you look at it, the more the question becomes complicated.

China is not the lowest-cost country for manufacturing.  But it does
have the manufacturing networks that don't exist anywhere else in the
world.  And Chinese companies have been moving up the "value chain".
It takes a while for perceptions to catch up to reality.

When we buy products, we cannot afford to do the research to have a
high probability of making the right choice.  We lean on brands.
Companies know this, with a few results:

- most companies try to cultivate a brand identity

  + advertising [GM]

  + high standards [Rolls Royce]

  + niche image [Tesla, Bugatti, Land Rover]

- sometime companies just exploit the delay between cheapening
  a product and the marketplace recognizing that effect.

  [Porche makes SUVs! RCA, Westinghouse, Marantz, ...]

- many companies are at a disadvantage because their brand is unknown
  and therefore not trusted. [HiSense]

For whatever reason, few RoC companies have brands that are valuable
in North America.  I'm old enough that I remember that being true of
Japanese brands.  I think I first heard of Sharp in 1965 on a visit to
Hong Kong.  In Japan, on that same trip, I first heard of the Japanese car
brands that became ubiquitous in North America a few years later.

Something manufactured in China with a "Motorola" brand (owned by
Lenovo, an RoC company) may seem like a safer bet than one with a
"Umidigi" or "Doogee" brand.  Remember when Motorola was a US company?
When they had their own important microprocessors (6800, 68000, etc.)?

Too many Chinese products that have interested me have been "fire and
forget": no support, no updates.  If you look at single-board
computers (think Raspberry Pi), there are many Chinese competitors
that are technically superior until you look at these issues.