Ask HN: Why is TSMC so competitive in semiconductor fabrication?

When it comes to research, it always costs a substantial amount to accomplish anything at all.

So the cost is always prominent, and the return is difficult to fully attribute.

Forces at work that can lead to undue cuts.

Engineering companies need to be run by engineering/businesspeople selected internally from a deep bench of capable candidates. As succession occurs technical leadership can better maintain continuity of what made the company competitive to begin with.

For the bean counters it can be impossible to realize potential in many ways, not just research. Concrete costs will always be ripe for quantitative elimination without consideration of the crippling effect on upside outcome that can not be recovered in less than a few years (or generations) after overcompensating funding has been restored.

Which could happen . . . right?

No conincidence how many different kinds of hard technology are referred to in "generations" of advancement.

Bean counters are supposed to be good at math but they're usually no engineers.

When these start to come into leadership positions of an engineering company it can be a very bad sign.

It could be worse.

Some of the top financial operators are not even bean counters, or leadership material of any kind. More like social climbers who've moved up a corporate ladder without much distraction from any effort other than the social climbing itself. Even worse when the only reason they're financial is greed.

Look what happened to Boeing when the engineering culture no longer extended all the way to the top.

Still an engineering company, with some of the world's most outstanding engineers doing very advanced things very successfully. Just not as much as it once was. And not as much as it could be.

Well acccounting companies should be run by accounting/businesspeople which does seem to work, and bean counters shine until generations later at a place like Arthur Andersen where it looks like they were replaced by social climbers at the top and oh, well.

It was science back then, it is science now. Using technologies at the time. 2000 years from now, some people will look at our era as barbarian and unscientific.

That also reminded me of _Connections_, which notably made the same point in _the late 1970s_! It isn't like technology's gotten any easier to understand -- in total, "top to bottom" -- since then.

After surrendering to the United States, Japanese companies were taught Harvard Business School ideas as part of a reconstruction effort.

While that is a very tiny piece of what is referred to as Japan's Economic Miracle, it is enough to explain the difference in exposure and susceptibility to Harvard Business School ideas compared to Korea, China, and Taiwan.

Semiconductor fabrication is winner takes all.

Intel won.

Everyone else but TSMC gave up in logic. Samsung mostly focused on memory.

TSMC got Apple as a customer.

Intel choked its lead by paying outrageous dividends and cutting R&D expenditure.

TSMC has done well. They've also done a Steven Bradbury.