Hey B&V,
What do you mean by the big boys don't make any technology anymore? Dell & HP do make their products, or at least a very large percentage of them (don't know about Nortel) with the exception of some of the smaller consumer items or 'special' products they're trying out (like MP3 players or TV's) But the PC's & enterprise systems they do make & build most of them, save some components (batts, vid cards, HDD, etc.). They may be made overseas, but in alot of cases those are facilities owned by the companies and worked by their employees & not 3rd party outsourcers.
Hey Scott D,
Just look the pharmaceuticals, toothpaste, dog food, and lead toys most Americans are unaware of what is actually happening at these companies. We see the commercials and print ads the announce "HP Invent" and actually believe it. This is not the case. By and large, if you consider calling an Asian manufacturer and having them silkscreen "Dell" or "HP" on their mp3 player, PDA, or computer product then sure I suppose that they "make" something.
Open a Dell up and you'll see that not a single bit is made by them. Dell has ALWAYS been this way. Every piece of a Dell (even the ones that might say Dell) have a counterpart you can buy from the company that actually designed, engineered, and manufactured it. My cousin is an "engineer" at Dell. He doesn't do anything but call the OEM producer, get their PC cards or mainboards, plug them in, test and then tell management which one performed the best at the least price. Their "value add" is that they pressure the actually producers to write better software drivers. Take a look at Dell's Patents (
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/patents/enus?c=us&l=en&s=corp&~section=01). Read the titles and you'll see they only have patents on how to sell to you. They have no patents on what they are selling to you.
That was Dell's "contribution" to the PC revolution. Their revolutionary business model whereby you call them, pay them, then they use your money to buy 5 or 6 Asian bits and plug them together. They then put it in a box with the Dell name on the outside and ship it to you within 30 days. This business model allowed them to be super efficient because they had none of their own money used at any time, it was aways the customer's money. They don't do true R&D, that is for the Asian suppliers that actually understand the technology. Dell's financials were better than the people that actually made bits because they had no inventory, warehousing, and less overhead (real engineers or designers, only QA).
HP is the same way. The legendary company of Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard used to actually do research & development and production. They made incredible products that redefined the industries of computing, test & measurement, and consumer products with high quality. Today HP doesn't design or manufacture make a hardly single hardware component. Maybe there is something they make somewhere, but you'll be pressed to find it as they spun off the parts of the company that do make things (Agilent). Sure they might have a designer create the outer shell, but pretty much nothing inside it made by them. The used to make great CPUs, calculators, etc. Now, they outsource everything but the finally plug in of their PCs same as Dell.
Since you mentioned the enterprise space, tell me what happened to HP-RISC, Alpha, and all the other CPUs that were revolutionary? Look at their servers. They still make a few designs that they produced, but those are on the way out and there is no new investment. Their future is selling Intel CPUs on commodity boards. Only at the highest end will they have their own board design, everything else will be licensed from another company. My friendly challenge for you is to ask what does Dell or HP offer that isn't the same as any other whitebox vendor? Please look through their catalog and find me a hardware piece or product that I can't get with a different SKU from the actual producer. What is theirs that I can't make myself by combining the same bits they do? How does this keep America competitive?
I know this industry well. I'm in Korea right now working with these same suppliers. If they all OPECed together, many US companies would be dead in the water. I promise you, many of our US "producers" did the math a long time ago and decided they made more selling other people's bits. In my mind most are just retailers. Literally, all they sell is other people's technology. There is no barrier to entry when all you are is a reseller. The Asians are waking up to this. It wouldn't surprise me to see a new entrant come from nowhere and displace either of these companies that actually can offer something different and better.
My worry is the the US will all be lawyers someday and we'll squabble over the little bits we have let while everything else goes to others.
