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Comment by kmlx | Hacker News Reader

weird. i don’t know anyone who has had a good experience, or who prefers american made products. cars, food, fashion etc. they represent bad taste and poor quality. i thought this was known globally. like how germans are technical. one of those things that are part truth, part myth.

where i come from if someone wants great quality we buy european, japanese or chinese products.

whenever i travel to different continents for work, no one i talk to wants or buys american made anything. it’s again, european, japanese or chinese.

of course software is different, due to its globalised nature.

and of course sometimes you buy american branded products. if you can’t find anything else, you kind of have to settle with the american product.

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I have had exposure to industrial equipment sales in Asia, Latin America and the Mideast. American-made equipment generally has an excellent reputation. Cost, however, is often an issue.

It would be helpful if you were more specific. Where do you come from? What types of products are you talking about?

I share same sentiment on consumer goods, especially cars.

Your experience with industrial equipment is irrelevant here since it's still being done in US.

This sounds totally foreign to me. In the industrial world, American equipment is pretty good quality. Japanese also. And German, Italian, and French.

Chinese is cheap but their machinery is generally not very good. They screw up all sorts of stuff: wrong bearings, designs are copied but not always thoroughly thought out, weld issues, poorly programmed PLCs, incorrect wiring, poor metals quality control, dangerous safety implementations, the list goes on and on. Some bigger manufacturers are getting better there.

But places like Turkey and Korea have a nice balance of technically "good enough" and cheaper than the Euro/American products, though Korean machines have gotten more expensive and are technically very sophisticated.

The idea that anyone building a factory would turn to China for technically sophisticated machinery is interesting and would be a quick way to get fired in industry. China has gotten a lot better over the years, but I think a lot of people forget that a lot of what happens in China is assembly, not necessarily manufacturing of the subcomponents, which is where much of the actual value add is. If you do get machinery made in China, you look for those who use as much European, Japanese, Korean, or American parts as possible.

> of course software is different, due to its globalised nature

Sure, not American, all the American software companies. They are global, unlike every other giant enterprise.

> one of those things that are part truth, part myth

Yeah perhaps true. But then I’d say that it’s essentially a meaningless conclusion to hold as some universal truth.

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