Comment by zbentley
1 day ago
> not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done.
For sure, but how do you know?
If it's only via:
> The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process.
...then I worry about the efficiency of improvement. Sure, manufacturing equipment salespeople definitely are in touch with what consumers want ("Everyone is buying lamb now, buy our new breed of high-birth-rate sheep!"), but that's under the assumption that manufacturers never improve/iterate on their own processes ("Our farm is competitive because we've found that feeding sheep our special high-protein diet increases birth dates").
Rather than relying on the consumers-experimenters-manufacturers game of telephone, it seems likely to me that many manufacturing improvements have been driven by marginal tweaks/improvements made on the factory floor.
> For sure, but how do you know?
In actual engineering, one can work out the theoretical limits (strength, expansion, etc) and measure the current product's performance against the limits. A new widget-making machine or process cannot imbue widgets with physics-defying properties. Any fundamental improvements can only be made on the outside, auch as new alloys; but that would be an entirely different product, nor the one you've been selling for 40 years that your customers trust and love.
If you don't have a very good marketing department, I'll still kick you out of business if I can double or triple the amount of widgets I can make because I started with the same machines you did - but I upgraded them with better controls, attached a few robot arms and now run a lights-out widget factory tended by a fraction of the workforce you employ while you reminisce about the good old times...
Well, I would suggest if a thing is around that long and still does the job, it’s close enough to done. Something going missing in the pushback here is this is a physical machine shop. My grandfather was the shop foreman for a jewelry maker and he was intensely proud of the fact he was the one person on the floor who still had all his fingers. Intact. Different jobs have different ideas about good Developer Experience.
Improvement is usually done via competition. Sometimes the competition is price based, and sometimes quality based. In the best of worlds, both.
For example, there are a ton of cheap crappy woodworking tools. Think Stanley etc. They barely do the job if at all. Then there are a group of vendors like Wood River that constantly create newer tools that are much more expensive than what you find in a big box tool store. And then farther up the food chain are vendors like Lie Nielsen who craft luxury tools that are amazing to use.
This market segmentation extends to most tools; someone like Woodpecker comes up with a ton of clever tools for marking/measuring etc for woodworking, then others copy them. Oldest story in capitalism.
The manufacturing improvements in this process are non-stop. For some really good examples in consumer electronics, read "Apple in China" to see how China transformed into a power house in a relatively short amount of time.