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Maybe we should all be learning Mandarin Standard Chinese, because there are some days it feels like these guys are going to bury us. There were a couple of stories in the tech press over the weekend that would chill the bones of anyone able to think of the long arc of history... you know, beyond the next long weekend. They were all about Apple, and depending on whether you're a believer or an infidel, they painted the company in either the best or the worst possible light.
The original source of the Apple story, which concerned the company's long-term shift to manufacturing overseas, especially in China, was the business section of the old media New York Times. Two reporters, Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, writing a long feature about the loss of middle-class American jobs, focused in hard on one of America's most successful companies. Apple used to boast about making its stuff in America, they pointed out. It can no longer do that. One anecdote from the Times piece pretty much says it all:
One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhones screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the companys dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
The speed and flexibility is breathtaking, the executive said. Theres no American plant that can match that.
No Australian plant, either. Not that we'd want to. Well, okay, maybe some guys in the Business Council and whoever sits on the Iron Throne of the Liberal party's workplace relations portfolio. But most everybody else, including most people in business, wouldn't want to live in a country which did business like that.
Trouble is, it's those deep, tectonic shifts in economic power and advantage upon which history pivots. Deng Xiaoping may not have intended to reboot a 21st-century version of industrial England's dark satanic mills when he took the clamps of the old command-driven Chinese economy, but it looks like that is what has happened. And it was those mills, as much as the Royal Navy, that made Britain the pre-eminent world power of the 19th century.
Read more: The future is looking Chinese
The original source of the Apple story, which concerned the company's long-term shift to manufacturing overseas, especially in China, was the business section of the old media New York Times. Two reporters, Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, writing a long feature about the loss of middle-class American jobs, focused in hard on one of America's most successful companies. Apple used to boast about making its stuff in America, they pointed out. It can no longer do that. One anecdote from the Times piece pretty much says it all:
One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhones screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the companys dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
The speed and flexibility is breathtaking, the executive said. Theres no American plant that can match that.
No Australian plant, either. Not that we'd want to. Well, okay, maybe some guys in the Business Council and whoever sits on the Iron Throne of the Liberal party's workplace relations portfolio. But most everybody else, including most people in business, wouldn't want to live in a country which did business like that.
Trouble is, it's those deep, tectonic shifts in economic power and advantage upon which history pivots. Deng Xiaoping may not have intended to reboot a 21st-century version of industrial England's dark satanic mills when he took the clamps of the old command-driven Chinese economy, but it looks like that is what has happened. And it was those mills, as much as the Royal Navy, that made Britain the pre-eminent world power of the 19th century.
Read more: The future is looking Chinese
