What Happened to GE? (2021)

Somehow the projects didn't feel like diverting people and budget to makework tasks that fit the Six Sigma model as opposed to their reality. It eventually faded to be replaced by other codswallop.

Regardless of how it happened in individual cases back then, this is still the case now, and if anything has accelerated, so it's not as worth mentioning as the wider phenomenon: Why are so many different companies in so many different industries putting out much worse business/consumer products these days? Because they're not in the business of selling to customers any more, but in the business of selling non-commodity money products to the financial sector in a little-known industry called "The New York Stock Exchange" so funds, or individuals, can bridge their shortfall between compounding obligations and shrinking currency value. GE isn't in the business of selling turbines, GM doesn't sell cars, Microsoft doesn't sell software, Broadcom doesn't sell components, Moderna doesn't sell pharmaceuticals, and Pepsico doesn't sell sugar water to children. All of them are in the primary business of selling money that's not on a pre-expected inflationary schedule, and everything else they do is just a particularly long-run guerrilla marketing campaign for that money over the other guy's in the corporate headquarters down the street. If they wanted to be in some other business, they'd either not go public in the first place or buy back their stock so they didn't have to serve two market masters any more.

This explains why going public can be such a Faustian bargain for so many otherwise successful companies that quickly and seriously trips them up; it's essentially a decision to pivot the business from a product market fit to a new sector most of the building usually knows nothing about, just because it will let them double-dip on monetizing their hard work. Is there any other situation where a move that extreme, or the same pivot for any other reason, wouldn't get laughed out of the room? I can't think of one. It turned out to work for a couple of years for google by letting them attract top talent to the advertising products of anything not called search or ads (before they've now been losing the plot just like everyone else), and combined with the good timing of running their business through the first quarter of this century made their pivot very successful, but most companies aren't called google.

It also explains a lot of surface-level counterintuitive behavior: why are too many arch-capitalists not nearly as interested in investing in innovations that price their competitors out of the market as we'd like them to be? Because they wouldn't be mostly investing in innovation but in advertising, since you can't innovate a piece of paper with "1 share" written on it (without running afoul of the SEC and co. at some point). Advertising isn't really an investment; it's more like gambling, and most of the financial sector sees gambling as an uncomfortable risk (for their suppliers anyway) even if you happen to be up a bit right now. They'd much rather see a steady "blue chip" growth pattern that's half a point above the index than the wild swings in revenue and spending that come from experimentation, so it only happens in C-suites with a culture of tolerating more gambles and their associated stock spikes. Why are so many companies moving to the same business model of skeleton operational costs and recurring subscriptions instead of trying to carve out different niches for different consumers? Because the financial world, by dollars, largely prefers the advertisement that that's how their suppliers increase the attractiveness of their quarterly reports, so the customer is always right. Why are even accelerating startups entering the big leagues so much more eager to get bought up by the bigger, more ossified old guard than try to replace them, even as it puts them at more and more legal risk? Because gaining a footing through advertising is an absolute slog of a business to cut against the grain in, much more than tech or manufacturing or grocery services or logistics or what have you, and in this age it's tougher than ever, so they make the reasonable decision to throw in the towel and drift off someone who's already got momentum.

I could go on, but I already feel like a broken record and it's mostly more of the same. There's plenty of historical particulars to consider, But what happened to GE from a 10,000-foot perspective? The same thing that happened to everyone else: the index hit 4-7٪, the appeal of being on the top of that pile looked like a mirage of water across the desert, and they pivoted, to unanimous applause until they either made it or the wheels came off. Everything else is the same story in a different setting.

We don't have cities like Shenzhen, where everything you need to get a product to market is within same-day courier range. I understand this was a feature of the old "hardware-centric" Silicon Valley, and it made fast iterations on new products a lot more viable. I wonder if we could even build a hub like that today, with property speculators and NIMBYism blocking anything short of grabbing a cornfield in Iowa and declaring it our new national manufacturing centrepiece.

We've completely ceded on education, and that was realistically where we could have competed. We could never match the labour prices of China or Viet Nam, but we could offer better trained workers. Our schools are a disaster, and it feels like we've completely lost a focus on competitiveness. It was only a few years ago, we were very fixated about being beaten in test scores, but now the focus has been lost to social battles (scares over LGBTQ+ content) which suck all the oxygen out of the room when people want to ask about actual student achievement.

We don't have the right backing for moonshot inventions. The way we lost solar panels to the PRC should be a freaking embarrassment. We knew for 40 years that people are going to want these things. Moreover, it was a new technology-- you didn't need to fight with entrenched players that didn't want to retool (like EVs)-- all you needed was a stream of seed capital and friendly loans to make sure people built here first.

This might be helped with some more government intervention-- strong industrial development finance products with a VC-esque mentality of "90% of them will fail, but a few will pay off 50-fold". The state is a good backer here, because they can take the "50-fold" in forms other than raw stock appreciation, like "securing an industrial edge for our country."

Chinese companies have been buying reputable brands, and building new reputable ones (not the disposable random-name spamming brands that Amazon lets ruin searches).

Maybe Samsung will figure out how to compete in the demand for good quality. As a consumer, I started to think they were moving in that direction in some categories, from their earlier budget-brand rep in computer products, but looks like maybe not.

(Example: There's been price-gouging for remaining new-old-stock Samsung 2.5" Pro SSD, because Samsung discontinued it. By reputation, people consider it better quality than any brand's current 2.5" SSD offerings.)

Signing off now to do a big load of dishes by hand.

The loss of American manufacturing directly threatens this pre-eminence, which in turn threatens a lot of what made this world the way it is.