In a completely unintentional but, at least for the purposes of my blogging, somewhat fortuitous coincidence that makes for a smooth transition from my last post to this one, I've spent my last two days of my life shut up in my garage. Starting the next Google? Youtube? Building self-replicating Hannah Montana dolls to take over the world? No, I was doing something a lot less exciting and a lot more difficult: trying to fix my car.
Without going into the laborious details of my House-like diagnostic genius and my profound mechanical prowess, at the end of the day I found out that the cause of all my headaches, the reason why my ABS/ETS/XKCD system wasn't working, was because the accountants over at Mercedes-Benz thought it imprudent to stick an extra ten cents worth of solder onto an $1800 circuit board. Although it was satisfying to put my planet-sized electrical engineering tuition bill to good use, it was still frustrating and frightening to think that a slight lapse in attention to such a miniscule detail almost became the downfall of an otherwise finely engineered, $50,000 automobile.
The approximate amount, and corresponding cost, of extra solder that would have saved me ten hours and the car from its dismal reliability rating.
And this brings up a critical point that, despite being in a country where big ideas and crazy dreams are cherished, success often depends on much more mundane habits like attention to detail. The only U.S. products that still dominate internationally come from its high-tech industry, an industry built by obsessive-compulsive engineers like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the Google guys. Was a computer operating system like MS-DOS truly that groundbreaking when it was released in the 1980s, a decade after the first Unix build? Similarly, the Ipod was unveiled three years after the first commercial mp3 player, and by the time Google entered the search-engine fray, giants like Yahoo and AOL had been in the market for eons. These companies didn't necessarily make anything new, but they made every facet of existing products better.
The more worrisome aspect of all this, though, is that attention to detail doesn't seem to be a trait that you're born with, or you can learn, but is inexplicably tied to your cultural background. Returning to the subject of cars, I used to think that Japanese automakers sprinkled some magical Shinto dust onto their cars so they would last forever, but now I think that their success has, just like that of America's technology companies, been a result of their scrupulous attention to even the tiniest of components:
A big-thinking GM executive might say, "okay, we've got four wheels and an engine, so let's weld a lot of steel to it to make it safe, then weld some more steel on it to make it bigger, and hey, while we're at it, let's weld some more steel on the front to make it uglier, and we'll call it a Hummer."
The deep sea angler fish was the main inspiration for the design of the Hummer H2. Other artistic influences include a brick and Ayers Rock.
A detail-oriented Mazda executive on the other hand would say, "watashiwa domo arigato naruto tokyo", or translated, "we have the RX series, which has been one of the most successful sports coupes in the world for several decades, but what if we made it better by shaving 88 grams from the rear-view mirror for the new RX-8?" Japanese cars aren't bigger or faster than their American counterparts, nor are they styled with the zeal and passion of the Europeans, but because of their obsession over the nittiest of bits, Hondas and Toyotas have become the most fuel-efficient, most-reliable, and downright most practical cars in the entire world.
Moral of the rather circumlocutious story: Chinese manufacturers need to go to Japan and learn how to not make crappy exports. And always, always over-solder.
Without going into the laborious details of my House-like diagnostic genius and my profound mechanical prowess, at the end of the day I found out that the cause of all my headaches, the reason why my ABS/ETS/XKCD system wasn't working, was because the accountants over at Mercedes-Benz thought it imprudent to stick an extra ten cents worth of solder onto an $1800 circuit board. Although it was satisfying to put my planet-sized electrical engineering tuition bill to good use, it was still frustrating and frightening to think that a slight lapse in attention to such a miniscule detail almost became the downfall of an otherwise finely engineered, $50,000 automobile.
The approximate amount, and corresponding cost, of extra solder that would have saved me ten hours and the car from its dismal reliability rating.
And this brings up a critical point that, despite being in a country where big ideas and crazy dreams are cherished, success often depends on much more mundane habits like attention to detail. The only U.S. products that still dominate internationally come from its high-tech industry, an industry built by obsessive-compulsive engineers like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the Google guys. Was a computer operating system like MS-DOS truly that groundbreaking when it was released in the 1980s, a decade after the first Unix build? Similarly, the Ipod was unveiled three years after the first commercial mp3 player, and by the time Google entered the search-engine fray, giants like Yahoo and AOL had been in the market for eons. These companies didn't necessarily make anything new, but they made every facet of existing products better.
The more worrisome aspect of all this, though, is that attention to detail doesn't seem to be a trait that you're born with, or you can learn, but is inexplicably tied to your cultural background. Returning to the subject of cars, I used to think that Japanese automakers sprinkled some magical Shinto dust onto their cars so they would last forever, but now I think that their success has, just like that of America's technology companies, been a result of their scrupulous attention to even the tiniest of components:
A big-thinking GM executive might say, "okay, we've got four wheels and an engine, so let's weld a lot of steel to it to make it safe, then weld some more steel on it to make it bigger, and hey, while we're at it, let's weld some more steel on the front to make it uglier, and we'll call it a Hummer."
The deep sea angler fish was the main inspiration for the design of the Hummer H2. Other artistic influences include a brick and Ayers Rock.
A detail-oriented Mazda executive on the other hand would say, "watashiwa domo arigato naruto tokyo", or translated, "we have the RX series, which has been one of the most successful sports coupes in the world for several decades, but what if we made it better by shaving 88 grams from the rear-view mirror for the new RX-8?" Japanese cars aren't bigger or faster than their American counterparts, nor are they styled with the zeal and passion of the Europeans, but because of their obsession over the nittiest of bits, Hondas and Toyotas have become the most fuel-efficient, most-reliable, and downright most practical cars in the entire world.
Moral of the rather circumlocutious story: Chinese manufacturers need to go to Japan and learn how to not make crappy exports. And always, always over-solder.
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