The Joy of Outsourcing...

[shiny!]

Re: The Joy of Outsourcing...

Touchring, I always build my own computers, but when my daily computer died last year I needed one that day, and had to buy one. I discovered the same thing you did: no fan inside. I couldn't believe it! It's really easy (and fun) to build your own PC, and for the same or less money as buying one from a store, you can put in much sturdier components and lots of cooling fans. Check out classes in your community college for building and repairing PCs.

The computer I use now that I built cost me about $450 in parts, and the closest I could find to it in a store would have cost me approx $900. I made a very cool, silent system that is extremely low energy consumption, yet powerful. I could not have found all these features in a pre-built box.

From what I can discern looking at refrigerators they all seem to be made by the same factory and just have different nameplates and slightly different plastic interiors. I am not sure you'll find much difference between them as I am guessing that there's been a consolidation of the manufacturing capacity during the past couple of recessions so there's only one or two companies in the USA that make all of them on contract to every brand including Kenmore, Amana, Maytag, Frigidaire etc. The high end stuff [mostly ranges and cooktops] seems to be over-complicated and under-engineered, often with specialized membrane touch control boards that look like they are just begging to fail and after a few years can't be replaced... My wife had to look for a long time to find a gas cooktop for the bunker with high-Btu burners, manual gas valves and a simple ignition system.

I called two appliance repair shops yesterday to ask if it's possible to replace the rubber gaskets around the fridge doors. The first shop, the owner said it would run $150-$250 to replace the gaskets. She said to keep what I have and don't buy a new fridge, because they're all garbage.

The second shop, the owner said that usually nobody makes replacement parts for appliances over 15 years old. I told him about the reviews I've read about new refrigerators, with plastic crumbling, liners cracking, compressors breaking and electrical components CATCHING ON FIRE. I asked him if he knew of any good ones that are still made in the USA. He recommended Frigidaire and Whirlpool Gold.

So I did some research and found the same complaints of shoddy quality in these lines- even the CATCHING ON FIRE! And here's the cherry on top:

Whirlpool Plant in Evansville, IN Closes on July 25, 2010. Plant moved to Mexico:
http://www.theindychannel.com/news/24041808/detail.html

I can only imagine the morale of the employees in that plant in the last few weeks and months, as they were assembling those refrigerators...

[c1ue]

Re: The Joy of Outsourcing...

I bought a $500 Atom based COMPAQ mini PC to serve as my file server a few months back, which shuts down by itself after 2 or 3 days of use.

Out of curiosity, why an Atom PC for use as ? You can buy an brand new Core 2 Duo box for $300.

Or do you run around with this file server?

A lot of this stuff hits home for me in my business. Electrical parts are crap today. Just pure junk. Most places don't even offer a quality option. It's a choice between crap and even worse crap. Has anyone else noticed how brittle and weak metal and plastic parts are today?

As you said - the pressures of pricing mean corners get cut anywhere and everywhere. I still remember the anecdote of the contracted wooden chairs in Australia - where the thickness of the wood kept shrinking.

The sad fact is that economically it is quite understandable that this is happening. With giant pay packages, the executives can promise the moon by delivering crap and be long gone before the consequences hit. Milken is another example: why be honest when you can even be convicted of major (white) collar crime, get fined 9 digits, and still be fabulously wealthy and young enough to spend the rest of your life on reputation refurbishment?

The high end stuff [mostly ranges and cooktops] seems to be over-complicated and under-engineered, often with specialized membrane touch control boards that look like they are just begging to fail and after a few years can't be replaced...

A friend of mine switched into repair of high end appliances 3 years ago - he's pulling in $300K+ a year. Expensive gadgets + bad economy + technically illiterate upper middle class types...

[shiny!]

Re: The Joy of Outsourcing...

A friend of mine switched into repair of high end appliances 3 years ago - he's pulling in $300K+ a year. Expensive gadgets + bad economy + technically illiterate upper middle class types...

Brilliant move on his part. I predict that in the coming depression, appliance repairmen will be the new Masters of the Universe.

[GRG55]

Re: The Joy of Outsourcing...

...A friend of mine switched into repair of high end appliances 3 years ago - he's pulling in $300K+ a year. Expensive gadgets + bad economy + technically illiterate upper middle class types...

That would seem a great opportunity, given all the McMansions stuffed with designer appliances that were built during the boom. Now people don't have the money to replace that stuff as it fails.

[jpatter666]

Re: The Joy of Outsourcing...

That would seem a great opportunity, given all the McMansions stuffed with designer appliances that were built during the boom. Now people don't have the money to replace that stuff as it fails.

Tell me about it -- I've an electrician friend who helps me out in exchange for computer work I do, but every time I've called a plumber, I think I entered the wrong field.....

Seriously high prices, and god help you if it is an emergency call.

Going to start learning some basic plumbing skills....

[Jay]

Re: The Joy of Outsourcing...

Tell me about it -- I've an electrician friend who helps me out in exchange for computer work I do, but every time I've called a plumber, I think I entered the wrong field.....

Seriously high prices, and god help you if it is an emergency call.

Going to start learning some basic plumbing skills....

Sorry couldn't resist:



Apologies to all the plumbers out there!

[touchring]

Re: The Joy of Outsourcing...

Out of curiosity, why an Atom PC for use as ? You can buy an brand new Core 2 Duo box for $300.

Or do you run around with this file server?

To be exact, it was around $430 with the LCD.

I put it in the living room and so wanted something discrete and not generate too much heat.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: The Joy of Outsourcing...

From what I can discern looking at refrigerators they all seem to be made by the same factory and just have different nameplates and slightly different plastic interiors.

An egg beater that one of my family members uses daily broke, and I went looking for one that did not have the same weak spot in the handle. Every manual egg beater on the planet has exactly the same handle and mechanicals, no matter who sells them. They differ only in cosmetics and price. I think there is one poorly paid Chinese worker in the corner of a factory somewhere making the entire world's supply of egg beaters.

I believe that Subzero refrigerators are still designed and made in America and built to last and be repairable (though they aren't cheap.) I don't have personal experience with them (beyond 20 minutes in their Dallas showroom once) however, so my recommendation is of limited value.

The webpages http://www.stillmadeinusa.com/appliances.html and http://www.ssrsi.org/Made%20In%20%20USA/apliances.htm claim to list various appliances still made in America.

I build my own computers as well, but when other family members want to purchase something ready-made, I recommend Pudget Systems. They go out of their way to choose the better quality, less trouble prone, components and to make stuff that will have a decent chance of lasting. They would not leave out a desirable fan just to save a few dollars.

[lsa420]

Re: The Joy of Outsourcing...

Sorry couldn't resist:



Apologies to all the plumbers out there!

How about we start up a plumbing company with only attractive female plumbers? That is kind of equity investment I could get down with...

[shiny!]

Re: The Joy of Outsourcing...

I believe that Subzero refrigerators are still designed and made in America and built to last and be repairable (though they aren't cheap.)

I'm pretty sure they cost more than what I bought my house for!

The webpages http://www.stillmadeinusa.com/appliances.html and http://www.ssrsi.org/Made%20In%20%20USA/apliances.htm claim to list various appliances still made in America.

The first link you gave has been updated since yesterday, when it listed Whirlpool in Evansville, IN. The second link mentions Fisher & Paykel. I have a Fisher & Paykel washing machine and it's the best appliance I've ever had.

I build my own computers as well, but when other family members want to purchase something ready-made, I recommend Pudget Systems. They go out of their way to choose the better quality, less trouble prone, components and to make stuff that will have a decent chance of lasting. They would not leave out a desirable fan just to save a few dollars.

Nice, thanks for that.

[flintlock]

Re: The Joy of Outsourcing...

technically illiterate upper middle class types...

Ah yes, my target market.

Repairclinic.com is a good site for appliance parts for any of you do-it-yourselfers. They have always had everything I needed. A bit expensive though. But cool pictures of every part.

When my wife bought the Kitchenaid refrigerator online, they told her to just go into the store and check out the Maytag, since they were virtually identical. And yes, that fancy keypad on the front worries me. I can't see it lasting through thousands of key punches by thirsty kids. My seven year old Fridgidaire had holes where the buttons used to be, from the constant pressing.

Leviton makes some of the worst electrical devices btw. At least the stuff they sell at Home Depot sucks.

It has gotten so bad that I now pretty much factor in a trip back for any job that has any electronic type device in it ( GFCI, AFCI, motion sensors, etc)

[flintlock]

Re: The Joy of Outsourcing...

Why? That's a very accurate picture from my experience. Norge!

[touchring]

Re: The Joy of Outsourcing...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ems-capacitors

How a stolen capacitor formula ended up costing Dell $300m

Though the American company had nothing to do with the industrial espionage in China in 2002 that led to faulty components, it paid the price with millions of faulty PCs

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dscn3961 by hr.icio.
Is the green capacitor faulty? Photo by hr.icio on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Dell sold millions of computers between 2003 and 2005 that had faulty components - specifically, capacitors, according to documents unsealed in a case being heard in the federal court in North Carolina.

In an article in the New York Times, Ashlee Vance writes about the problems that Dell faced - and how it tried to prevent them becoming more widely known:

"Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company's employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute."

The documents do sound fascinating - though so far the only one from the case that that has made it onto the wider web from the case is this one - which is simply a list of documents that are no longer sealed. (The case is being heard at the Federal District Court in North Carolina.)

In 2005, Dell announced that it was taking a $300m charge to cover the cost of fixing and/or replacing the faulty machines.

The NYT then argues that "The documents chronicling the failure of the PCs also help explain the decline of one of America's most celebrated and admired companies. Perhaps more than any other company, Dell fought to lower the price of computers."

That may be true - but it's not the whole story. Dell ran afoul, quite without realising it, of one of the most fascinating pieces of industrial espionage of recent times: the theft of a formula for making the electrolyte to go into capacitors from a Japanese company, which got taken to China, and then onto Taiwan - but somewhere, got messed up.

How do I know? Because I wrote about it seven years ago:

"A scientist steals a secret formula for an electrical product from his Japanese employer and takes it to China. Then it is stolen again and turns up in Taiwan. But something goes wrong - and thousands, perhaps millions, of computers and electrical goods in the West begin to burn out or explode.

"It sounds like the plot of a thriller, but it's reality. Thousands of computers have failed and nobody is sure how many more products might go wrong because their capacitors - essential components to control the power supply - were made with faulty materials."

In 2001, a scientist - name still unknown - left Rubycon Corporation Japan to go and work for the Luminous Town Electric company in China. Both companies made (among other things) electrolytic capacitors, which are usually used in power circuits. At the LTE Company, the scientist made a copy of the electrolyte - the chemical that goes inside the capacitors and enhances its capacitative properties.

"Later that year, the scientist's staff defected to Taiwan, taking with them a copy of the electrolyte formula so they could set up their own company. Taiwan supplies 30 per cent of the world's electrolytic capacitors and most of the big PC manufacturers get their machines assembled in Taiwan. But the defectors mis-copied the formula. After a few hours of operation, the electrolyte would leak hydrogen gas, before bursting the metal body of the capacitor. The electrolyte would then leak its brownish filling and could cause a fire."

IBM confessed to having a problem - and so too, privately, did Dell at the time. But that was before it began selling millions of machines which had a consistent problem: the capacitors weren't up to scratch.

Because according to the NYT story, the problem that kept cropping up with those machines was, indeed, the capacitors. "The problems affecting the Dell computers stemmed from an industrywide encounter with bad capacitors produced by Asian PC component suppliers. Capacitors are found on computer motherboards, playing a crucial role in the flow of current across the hardware. They are not meant to pop and leak fluid, but that is exactly what was happening earlier this decade, causing computers made by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple and others to break."

Passive Component Industry Magazine (passive components are things like capacitors and resistors) wrote about this in September 2002, though it didn't know then quite how bad things would get. As Dell's experience showed, it could get very bad indeed.

Back in 2003, Dennis Zogbi, president of Paumanok Publications, an expert on the market for passive components, told me that the problem is that "People want Western quality at Chinese prices," he said. "Well, you can't have both."

The story continued well after that, though, with sites such as Badcaps staying on the back of manufacturers including Apple which had had the faulty components. Wikipedia refers to the "capacitor plague" - and though it does seem to have gone into remittance now, Chris Passalacqua, owner of Badcaps, suggests, "They didn't discover this until it was too late and they had manufactured and distributed literally MILLIONS of these flawed capacitors. However, it's been going on way too long to simply blame on an industrial espionage boo-boo in my humble opinion, as this problem is still extremely common, and hasn't slowed down. Personally, I think it all boils down to shoddy components that are manufactured by shoddy component makers."

And that's where we circle back to Dell's problems. The NYT said that "The documents chronicling the failure of the PCs also help explain the decline of one of America's most celebrated and admired companies. Perhaps more than any other company, Dell fought to lower the price of computers." And that's certainly true: for years, Dell led because it could undercut rivals, and kept pushing the price down.

But price and quality control are always in conflict - and in the end that seems to have done for Dell. While other companies had the capacitor problem too, they didn't suffer it as long as Dell appears to have. So it was partly something Dell couldn't have expected to have control over, namely the electrolyte formula in the capacitors in the motherboards and/or power supplies - but also partly something Dell could have acted on, which was the repeated failure of those capacitors.

Meanwhile, if anyone does have a Pacer account and wants to repost those court documents, please link them below.