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What Happened to GE? (2021)

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Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#71

Post by aidenn0 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #31
yodon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haier is a remarkable company. It's not an accident that GE appliances took off after Haier purchased it.

It's darkly amusing that, at least for me and others on this thread, keeping the "GE" brand label is probably costing them sales. I also wouldn't even glance at a GE-branded home appliance if I were in the market, on the assumption it was cost-cutting trash, but if it's true that a different company has bought the brand and is making good stuff under it, now suddenly I might be interested. Which is the opposite of ho…

We needed a ventless dryer because the vent our dryer was using was incredibly illegal. The only ones sized for a family of 6 available in the US were GE branded. The thing works great, but I would have bought any other brand if it were available.

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#72

Post by lumost »

kortilla wrote: post #33
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So fraud?

No, it changes the risk profile. It’s not much different to selling your house to someone and then renting it back.

Claiming the sales as a profit in the above situation is dubious. When I leaseback an asset I previously owned, I am taking a long term liability which is larger than the profit. This is totally fine in the case of something like an office building - a company probably won’t be around or be fit for the lifetime of the building - but dubious for core company assets.

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#73

Post by applied_heat »

neilv wrote: post #69

After suffering through a new (lemon) GE-branded fridge, I don't see myself ever buying a GE-branded thing again. Fool me once. I have some hope that Samsung will learn from GE, and decide not to fully discard its more recent-era reputation for quality and excellence.

Too late, Samsung appliances are disposable garbage now.

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#74

Post by dv_dt »

neilv wrote: post #69

After suffering through a new (lemon) GE-branded fridge, I don't see myself ever buying a GE-branded thing again. Fool me once. I have some hope that Samsung will learn from GE, and decide not to fully discard its more recent-era reputation for quality and excellence.

The original GE sold off the GE appliance brand to a Chinese industrial company many years ago.

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#75

Post by hakfoo »

roenxi wrote: post #26
tharne wrote: post #5

What happened to GE? Simple. Jack Welch killed the golden goose. During his tenure he shifted focus and money away from long-term R&D in the name of boosting quarterly profits. Product development took a back seat to selling "services", i.e. focus more on selling contracts around maintaining your turbines than you do on developing and manufacturing good turbines in the first place. I won't even get into the heavy bor…

Wasn't Welch the one who was using "sack 10% of the managers each year" as a strategy? That one was obviously long-term stupid; I can see it being healthy for maybe a cycle or 2, but after that it would just kill off all the intangibles of management. At some level, every company relies on a culture of people doing the right thing to thrive over the long term. Although I do think that it is a mistake to just pin blam…

The reason US manufacturing excellence doesn't make sense is because we let it rot.

We don't have cities like Shenzhen, where everything you need to get a product to market is within same-day courier range. I understand this was a feature of the old "hardware-centric" Silicon Valley, and it made fast iterations on new products a lot more viable. I wonder if we could even build a hub like that today, with property speculators and NIMBYism blocking anything short of grabbing a cornfield in Iowa and declaring it our new national manufacturing centrepiece.

We've completely ceded on education, and that was realistically where we could have competed. We could never match the labour prices of China or Viet Nam, but we could offer better trained workers. Our schools are a disaster, and it feels like we've completely lost a focus on competitiveness. It was only a few years ago, we were very fixated about being beaten in test scores, but now the focus has been lost to social battles (scares over LGBTQ+ content) which suck all the oxygen out of the room when people want to ask about actual student achievement.

We don't have the right backing for moonshot inventions. The way we lost solar panels to the PRC should be a freaking embarrassment. We knew for 40 years that people are going to want these things. Moreover, it was a new technology-- you didn't need to fight with entrenched players that didn't want to retool (like EVs)-- all you needed was a stream of seed capital and friendly loans to make sure people built here first.

This might be helped with some more government intervention-- strong industrial development finance products with a VC-esque mentality of "90% of them will fail, but a few will pay off 50-fold". The state is a good backer here, because they can take the "50-fold" in forms other than raw stock appreciation, like "securing an industrial edge for our country."

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#76

Post by Swizec »

rswail wrote: post #70

Lesson from GE: Financial engineering is not engineering. Further lessons from GE: * Gaming the system internally or externally is something a CEO needs to actively manage and defeat, not reward. * Trying to turn businesses based on contracts for delivery (with lumpy revenue/risks) into contracts for service and recurring revenue is a dangerous game, because you take your eye off the ball that is delivering the produ…

> Conglomerates of disparate businesses never work in the long term

Tell that to Yamaha, Mitsubishi, Siemens, 3M, etc

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#77

Post by neilv »

applied_heat wrote: post #73
neilv wrote: post #69

After suffering through a new (lemon) GE-branded fridge, I don't see myself ever buying a GE-branded thing again. Fool me once. I have some hope that Samsung will learn from GE, and decide not to fully discard its more recent-era reputation for quality and excellence.

Too late, Samsung appliances are disposable garbage now.

Maybe Samsung could come back from that?

Chinese companies have been buying reputable brands, and building new reputable ones (not the disposable random-name spamming brands that Amazon lets ruin searches).

Maybe Samsung will figure out how to compete in the demand for good quality. As a consumer, I started to think they were moving in that direction in some categories, from their earlier budget-brand rep in computer products, but looks like maybe not.

(Example: There's been price-gouging for remaining new-old-stock Samsung 2.5" Pro SSD, because Samsung discontinued it. By reputation, people consider it better quality than any brand's current 2.5" SSD offerings.)

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#78

Post by coliveira »

adventured wrote: post #44
hackernewds wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple companies have turned into glorified financial firms with their core product becoming auxillary. Look at airline credit cards, Starbucks loyalty cards, Block's Bitcoin repository, AMZN investing in Rivian and so on.

Starbucks is a terrible example. That's like claiming the Costco membership makes the Costco retail business the auxillary. Or that Kroger/CVS/Walgreens membership/rewards cards do the same for those retail businesses (when in fact all they do is drive higher rates of return visits and higher sales). The Starbucks business remains almost entirely their retail service business.

In fact, for all these companies the retail operation is a secondary business. Their main business is to prop up the stock. They do that using all kinds of accounting and financial tricks, the reward cards being one of them. These companies will do anything to increase short term valuation, such as stock buybacks (totally useless for the business), announcing vaporware/initiatives that have little impact on business but look good for investors, etc.

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#79

Post by rgmerk »

Swizec wrote: post #76
rswail wrote: post #70

Lesson from GE: Financial engineering is not engineering. Further lessons from GE: * Gaming the system internally or externally is something a CEO needs to actively manage and defeat, not reward. * Trying to turn businesses based on contracts for delivery (with lumpy revenue/risks) into contracts for service and recurring revenue is a dangerous game, because you take your eye off the ball that is delivering the produ…

> Conglomerates of disparate businesses never work in the long term Tell that to Yamaha, Mitsubishi, Siemens, 3M, etc

Aren’t the Japanese conglomerates perpetually underperforming businesses that get away with it because Japanese shareholders are toothless?

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#80

Post by 1123581321 »

neilv wrote: post #69

After suffering through a new (lemon) GE-branded fridge, I don't see myself ever buying a GE-branded thing again. Fool me once. I have some hope that Samsung will learn from GE, and decide not to fully discard its more recent-era reputation for quality and excellence.

GE washing machines and dishwashers are solid and the distributor service network still backs them. Haier (the company that owns GE Appliance) sells Haier-branded appliances that aren't bad for the money, too.

Commercial appliances are the way to go for reliability. They are 3-4x the cost but for some appliance categories that's palatable. E.g., we were able to buy a Speed Queen but haven't found a commercial fridge we're comfortable buying.

Commercial isn't all upsides, either, since you are committing to owning the same unit for longer and paying for a series of repairs over time (or DIY if you have time and expertise.) The bulk of the retail market would rather put that money into a new unit every 8-10 years. We're with the crowd in some appliance categories, not all.

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