China Tech

Yesterday I opened two parcels, the contents of each had been made in China. In fact this is a pretty common situation for us all, but although the items are made in China they are rarely attributed to the Chinese. This situation is going to start to change.

Chinese companies are very capable and in a lot of cases are doing much more than just make the products that we buy with a western companies name on it. This has been an expedient way to demonstrate the quality of their manufacturing, the iPhone itself an excellent example of this, but why would these companies not want their own name on the product instead?

At this point our conceit about the necessity for “Western” input into successful products blinds us to the capabilities of Chinese companies. Along with this goes a perception of Chinese home grown products being cheap rubbish that breaks easily. After all what mobile phone would you rather carry one made by Apple or one made by Huawei?

I remember my father telling me that once upon a time Made in Japan was seen as a mark of poor quality, something you would never buy. That has significantly reversed with people seeing these products now as quality items, companies such as SONY at the forefront of this. Japan though is a relatively small country, when China makes this step and their products become revered for their quality what will happen then? Will western brands, so dependant on Chinese manufacturing, survive the deluge?

Blackberry and Apple Crumble

This week has been interesting for the staff at Rim with their consumer BIS users being separated from services that they love. At the same time Apple have struggled with the demand for their new operating system causing issues with the update itself. This is particularly worrying because part of the new OS is a cloud service.

I write this not because I am an Android user and thus revel in the pain of these companies, because Androids turn will inevitably come. I write this because it demonstrates how easy it is for small problems to almost instantly become massive when so many users are affected and are connected to internet services. These incidents will almost certainly have affected Rim more than Apple, young users in the grip of a fashion to use Blackberry messenger will discover facebook chat or google talk works just as well. Indeed the iMessage technology in Apples ios5 may well be another blow to this service, assuming of course people can install it!

What is certain is that more effort will be made to avoid this in future, things will get better still. We should not forget in the middle of this kind of incident that error is what has lead us to the place we are currently in. Every error, leads us to making a different decision next time. So don’t lambaste these companies too hard because the embarrassment they suffer today will lead to better services tomorrow.