Insights from Chapter 10
#1
The invention of the handheld calculator was an American product, but the Japanese dominance of other aspects of the consumer electronics industry made it clear that American companies had lost control of the market.
#2
The Japanese made 45 percent of the calculators sold in the United States in 1977. By the early 1980s, their share of the American market was above 70 percent.
#3
The television set is a direct descendant of the cathode ray tube, which was invented in the late nineteenth century. The television image is created by firing a moving beam of electrons toward the phosphorescent screen.
#4
The American television market was dominated by several major firms, which sold their products through franchise dealerships. This made it difficult for new firms to enter the market, as it was the biggest and most lucrative television market by far.
#5
The American semiconductor industry, during the first booming decade after Jack Kilby and Bob Noyce hit upon the monolithic idea, could safely look upon these developments in consumer electronics as irrelevant. In chips, the American pioneers had an enormous technological lead over foreign competitors everywhere.
#6
The Japanese had a collective eye on the semiconductor business during the 1960s and early 1970s. The American firms that refused to cooperate were Texas Instruments and Fairchild. The Japanese were determined to exclude most foreign competition in high-tech fields, but they needed access to both the Noyce patent and the Kilby patent.
#7
The Japanese electronics industry was able to take advantage of the American recession of the 1970s to expand their market share. The American industry could not rebuild fast enough to meet the demand, and their customers went shopping for an alternate source of RAM chips, which they found in Japan.
#8
The Japanese electronics firms had maintained their work force and production capacity during the recession, and they were able to take advantage of the market for 16K RAMs in the mid-1970s. They began dispatching high-quality, competitively priced chips around the world.
#9
The American semiconductor industry, launched on a wave of government financing and still receiving tens of millions of dollars annually from the Pentagon for research and development, was hardly in a position to complain about Japanese grants to their competitors.
#10
The Anderson bombshell, which stated that the Japanese memory chips were of higher quality than American ones, was a slap in the face that could not be ignored. American semiconductor companies began to learn about Japanese quality control practices.
#11
W. Edwards Deming was a scientist and engineer who began lecturing and consulting on the importance of statistics in the 1930s. He developed a method of squeezing two workdays out of one: he would work until midafternoon, nap until eight-thirty at night, and then rise for several more hours of business.
#12
The Deming message is simple: do it right the first time. To carry out the obvious, however, requires detailed effort. To achieve consistent quality, those involved in any operation must maintain statistical control—that is, careful, regular measurement of all aspects of the job.
#13
The American industry learned the hard way that the Deming rules should be followed in the late twentieth century, when Japanese and other foreign competitors began to threaten their dominance.
#14
The Japanese were so convinced by what they heard from Deming that they invited him back to Tokyo year after year to spread his gospel. His name and profile adorn the Demingu Prize, an annual industrial award carrying the stature of the American Pulitzer Prizes.
#15
The American semiconductor industry was shocked by the Japanese success in memory chips, and began to change their quality standards to compete. However, they did not change their standards enough to head off the Japanese challenge.
#16
The American semiconductor industry, led by founding father Robert N. Noyce, turned to Washington for help in delivering a warning that the Japanese were coming. The Reagan administration responded by imposing a quota system on Japanese exports.
#17
Bob Noyce, the founder of Intel, was the first CEO of an industry-wide consortium called Sematech. The goal of Sematech was to see to it that American chip makers could match or exceed the Japanese in speed and quality of manufacturing.
#18
While the American industry was able to turn around and surpass the Japanese industry, there was one shadow over the achievement: Bob Noyce, the man who was probably more responsible for the American renaissance than anyone else, died shortly after it had happened.