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Why YKK? The Japanese company behind the world’s best zippers

slate.com

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Re: Why YKK? The Japanese company behind the world’s best zippers

#5

Post by dalke »

andy_ppp wrote: post #4

The article is okay, however it says the no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft, I thought the phrase was IBM?

Yes. http://books.google.com/books?id=ephPAAAAYAAJ&q=%22no+one+ev... shows an IBM example from 1978.

> And so the conventional wisdom became "No one every got fired for buying IBM equipment."

Re: Why YKK? The Japanese company behind the world’s best zippers

#6

Post by bshimmin »

I suspect many people who've ever idly looked at a zip will have noticed the letters "YKK" on them, and at least a few of those people will have made it to YKK's Wikipedia page, which is at least equally as informative as this article.

I was a bit confounded by this sentence: "The precision necessary to craft a working bicycle chain or a smoothly meshing zipper was simply beyond us for all those prior millennia." Surely the author means to write "The precision necessary to craft ... on a massive scale"; of course we've been able to build things requiring comparable or greater precision for centuries, but to build the machines necessary to mass-produce them is a relatively recent innovation. Or perhaps he was just joking.

Re: Why YKK? The Japanese company behind the world’s best zippers

#7

Post by srean » 

  Yoshida also preached a management principle he termed “The
  Cycle of Goodness.” It holds that “no one prospers unless
  he renders benefit to others.”
I particularly liked that line. That is how things ought to be but not sure that is how it plays out. For example I am quite skeptical whether removing arbitrage opportunities over a timescale of milisecond really benefits anybody.

Re: Why YKK? The Japanese company behind the world’s best zippers

#8

Post by tudorw »

"The EU’s General Court backed the European Commission’s fines of 150 million euros ($187 million) for YKK, based in Tokyo, and 110 million euros for Coats in 2007 over cartels involving fasteners and related machinery, one of which ran for more than 21 years. The EU said at the time that the zipper market was worth about 400 million euros a year and the market for other metal fasteners was worth 200 million euros."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-27/coats-and-ykk-lose-...

Re: Why YKK? The Japanese company behind the world’s best zippers

#9

Post by VLM »

bshimmin wrote: post #6

I suspect many people who've ever idly looked at a zip will have noticed the letters "YKK" on them, and at least a few of those people will have made it to YKK's Wikipedia page, which is at least equally as informative as this article. I was a bit confounded by this sentence: "The precision necessary to craft a working bicycle chain or a smoothly meshing zipper was simply beyond us for all those prior millennia." Sur…

Roller bearings are old, but no one ever made a ball bearing until the bicycle era. They grew up together, and the first ball bearing equipped bicycles dominated competition about a century ago. Ball bearings were the carbon fiber of their era.

I don't think ball mfgr technology of a level of roundness and surface quality suitable for ball bearings was compatible with ancient technology. The metalurgy would be highly questionable but that aspect would be possible.

You are partially correct that roller chain could have been built by ancient craftsmen if they had the idea, but the invention credit is about a century ago. The metalurgy would have been questionable, the ancients would have ended up with chain links the size of your fist, which would have screwed up weight and power transmission making a v-belt a lot more likely. I'm surprised bicycles don't try v-belts.

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