LOL Zach!

Coming from someone that was in marching band, I can say this was truly amazing and the amount of time that went into creating it had to be insane.  I’m sure the director of the operation was just glad that he wasn’t working with high schoolers like my band director was.

Gah, bitterness rising. I bought a Samsung TV two months ago, and two weeks after receiving it, lost the picture. It took three visits over 6 weeks from Samsung field techs to finally figure out that it was a bad panel. I’m currently waiting for the new panel to be ordered and delivered. Now I see what the holdup is. =\

Oh, and I forgot to add an example of an American company that puts out good products I can heartily endorse: Lie-Nielson, who make wonderful hand planes I use in my instrumentmaking work.  Of course, you can’t really call them “innovative”, since there’s been no real advance in plane design in the last, say, two hundred years…

Hey ingolfson- you will have noticed that I said “many” and not “all” American companies are dinosaurs etc.  I was thinking of the auto industry in particular, which is arguably outinnovated by furriners, whiny, and litigious.  Calling them “dinosaurs” is a bit much, I admit- I don’t mean to insult those lovely beasts who ruled the Earth for so many millions of years.

OK first of all, that’s just incredible.  I don’t know if it has any bearing on business success, though, given the fact that the US makes the most and the best consumer electronics.  USA!!! USA!!! USA!!! 

(Les, we need a “clueless redneck” smilie)

I’ve got to disagree with the “giving the customers what they want” argument as the motivation behind the whole performance. Whether this did take place in Japan or Korea, it reminds me a lot of the school festivals/sports days we have at the school I teach at in Japan (yes, we do big coordinated dance numbers). The reasoning behind them isn’t anything to do with the audience, which is mostly the students themselves. It’s supposed to be about working together and building teamwork skills, team spirit, etc. Good goal, I suppose…but in reality, it doesn’t really work that way. The students care about as much as you’d expect 14 year olds to, and the teachers hate the whole event, because it causes massive disruptions for weeks beforehand rehearsing. I must admit that’s the first thing I thought of when I saw it – “I wonder how much forced, unpaid overtime they did to rehearse, and how many schedules were rearranged for daily practice of this whole thing.” Doesn’t seem very productive to me.

Oh I know the good things too, and the really bad things have only been in the last decade, but in tech, the auto industry and job-training, the asian companies have been kicking our ass for some time, and all the problems are home-grown.  We don’t compete with them…  Not can’t…. don’t.  United States business practices, not usually our laws or our pesky workers rights issues (which, unfortunately are still issues) but the way our businesses CHOOSE to do business…. are often the problem…. Not the least of which is our avoidance of any direct feedback from customers… and our reliance on marketing to make a product sell even if there isn’t really a market for it. 

Company A makes a product because they want to sell it.  They tell the marketing department to find a way to sell it.  When it turns out that the market isn’t quite there yet, they drop it and start over.  And incidentally, if someone steps in and says “If you change it just a little bit, it might work”, they say “No, we’re too busy, and if you do it anyway, we’ll sue you.”

This is why the largest budgets in many big corporations are marketing and legal.  Where’s the innovation or the R&D;?  Even the companies that don’t use these tactics have to have an army of lawyers in their pocket to protect themselves from those who do.

Yeah.. the patent system stinks, but the corporate world doesn’t have to do things the way it does to make money.  They just think they have to to make a LOT of money.  That’s just broke.

All of this is just in this country.  The rest of the world isn’t perfect, but we’re the only developed country without universal healthcare, the only developed country that has no penalties for losing a law suit, our workers get the fewest sick days and work some of the longest hours and get paid less than in many other countries….

Then I see something like this video.  If they do this kind of thing just for fun, something that takes a lot of effort and practice, how much effort do you think they put into something that is really important?  Can anyone here see a US company doing that?

Seems a Korean thing – the North Koreans have been doing that for years. And they don’t even have electricity

Just for kicks, I’ll also disagree with sowrdsbane and zilch – What makes every nation believe their own companies / societies / whatever sucks? I know it from Germany, I know it from New Zealand… Takes a foreigner sometimes to go to a nation and point out whats good about it.

Tim beat me to it:  don’t ever make the mistake of calling a Korean Japanese to his face, or vice versa: there is a teeny bit of antagonism between the two countries.

I also agree with what swordsbane said: compared to many Asian companies, many American enterprises are dinosaurs, proud of it, and whiny and litigious when they’re outinnovated by the furriners.

So much effort- but for anyone’s real benefit?

  The audience.  That’s why the foreign companies, particularly the asians.. kick our asses.  They concentrate on giving their customers what they want, or what they think they want (and they at least try to find out)  Meanwhile, over here in the US, our businesses concentrate on making money.  Focus groups are hand-picked and marketing is telling us what to buy instead of asking what we want.  Our CEOs and board members are the richest in the world.  Our companies aren’t.  If there isn’t a lesson in there somewhere, I’m a pink ferret.  Even with the home field advantage, our companies lose more than they win.

  Even Microsoft, the company that cornered the market on telling people what they like “Or else, Bub” (and made a lot of money off the concept) has to lie to their customers to keep them.  Tell me something isn’t back asswards in the way we do business.  Toyota was selling hybrids faster than they could make them and demand was growing.  GM and Fords response? “It’s a fad.”  Well, it wasn’t, and anyone who saw past the oil subsidies knew that, and now Ford and GM are playing catch-up in a game where you can’t play catch-up.  Sony was an awesome company, until after they went international and caught the US bug.  They started playing things the American way.  Now, they’re just part of the crowd… Too big to fold up and die, but too stubborn to change back to what they were.

  US companies do business to make money, preferably off of US citizens first.  Successful companies do business to keep doing business, and they don’t really care who their customers are.  We should take the hint.