91–100 of 112 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to be, at best, something you try and use as a value add to your real service like DB consulting.
Why not make your real service on-site repair? That's less outsourceable than consulting, even.
Caveat Emptor. If you can't fork you aren't free. The Makerbot rose up from a spirit of sharing and community goodwill, made money and employed local Brooklyites - so it was a flagship for the sharing economy and open hardware. Now there is an impression that they closed it off. Make4rbot was bought by the holder of a patent for the sintering 3D printing technology, seen as an impediment to this useful methods commun…
In a number of ways this echoes the early microcomputer industry (thinking the 1970s-80s), when dozens of competing and incompatible standards existed. Atari, Apple, Commodore, Amiga, just to name a few. And as the industry neared middle age in the 1990s, shopping for a "PC Clone" was a cornucopia of options: a copy of PC Shopper was hundreds of pages thick, each with ads for "custom made" PC clones "built to your sp…
Jobs had seen Kay's Dynabook at Parc and had some vision of what portable computers could offer. Apple phones made $250 per phone, even with less than 0.5% of the market Jobs had already won as Nokia et al. made ~pence per phone.
Cartels and Monopolies naturally aggregate to protect incumbents from the needs & desires of the customer and society from the painful costs of over rapid progress, yet like great empires companies decline when their owners lose touch with their daily customers needs, demands or desires.
Intellectual property rights are not natural rights but a social contract, providing temporary monopoly in exchange for social benefit.
Rinse and repeat.
A lot of people wonder why large companies can't just stay in the US and compete on quality, and here is a great case for why. It doesn't matter how great your workers are, you can't sell a product for $3,000 when others are selling it for $600. Especially when it's a technology still in development. And I know we pay extra for the warm and fuzzies knowing that something is made in the states, but I'm sure the home t…
At least it feels that way. It's not the same feeling as if production of cheap sunglasses gets off-shored.
If Middle America wants those jobs, Middle Americans are welcome to start a fashion label of their own. But since they seem to thrive on blandness in the Midwest I doubt that's going to happen.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11574854 and marked it off-topic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I often wonder if costs could be lowered for many of these companies if they would stop locating in some of the country's most expensive places to operate and for their employees to live. I know the arguments about workforce availability and all that, but I've never seen a proper look into it.
Probably. But then there is shipping. If I may stray a bit. The price to ship a small package from Adafruit to a place less than 10 miles cost me around $10.00 - 4 days tops. I can make a similar purchase for a Chinese spoofed version and have it in 7 days, free shipping. I don't know how the heck the shipping from China is so cheap. While to ship anything inside the us is frigging expensive...to ship outside the us…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I often wonder if costs could be lowered for many of these companies if they would stop locating in some of the country's most expensive places to operate and for their employees to live. I know the arguments about workforce availability and all that, but I've never seen a proper look into it.
Probably. But then there is shipping. If I may stray a bit. The price to ship a small package from Adafruit to a place less than 10 miles cost me around $10.00 - 4 days tops. I can make a similar purchase for a Chinese spoofed version and have it in 7 days, free shipping. I don't know how the heck the shipping from China is so cheap. While to ship anything inside the us is frigging expensive...to ship outside the us…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I often wonder if costs could be lowered for many of these companies if they would stop locating in some of the country's most expensive places to operate and for their employees to live. I know the arguments about workforce availability and all that, but I've never seen a proper look into it.
It still wouldn't help. It's cheaper to manufacture electronics in China even if the labor costs are the same . The logistics are vastly better over there. If you need PCBs or components, you can have them direct from the factory on the same day. If you have a production problem, you can get a specialist engineer the same day. If you need a new production line with 200 extra staff, you can have it up and running in t…