Thursday - March 28, 2013

Hecho En Mexico

Still waiting for my new PC to arrive. It shipped several days ago. I pulled up the tracking link from the email Dell sent me, but the Fed-Ex site doesn’t give me much data. My machine went through Fed’s Fort Worth processing center in about 8 hours, 3 days ago. That’s all it shows. Almost. At the top of the window is a source line. It says that my shipment originated in Juarez. What??? Dude, that’s, like, Mexico!

Yup. No sher, schmitlock. The iconic computer company from Austin Texas doesn’t make computers in Austin Texas any longer. Not for years actually. Turns out that they don’t even make computers in the United States anymore either, having closed assembly plants all over and laid off thousands. And this is old news. Well excuuuuuuse me, I haven’t been paying attention to the details of the computer world for at least half a decade. I know it’s a cut throat industry, one that is constantly evolving, changing, and inventing new ground shaking paradigms almost daily. So I shouldn’t be surprised. And I should have put 01 and 01 together and seen that they add up to 10 when I shopped for the PC online and saw that all their machines have been “packagized”; the old “build it your way” components option list a thing of the distant past. Who am I kidding? Almost all the parts come from Indonesia or China. Things might be designed here, but they’re built there. So why bother to even assemble them here? Silly Drew.

Guess I was fooling myself; I never gave it any thought, but if I had I would have thought ... Dell; American. The story of Dell Computers is a classic American Success tale, a story of how one man made millions - billions, dozens of them - and built a huge company by providing a better product to the marketplace. But the outsourcing seed was always there, even at the very beginning. The very first Dell computers were IBM PCs that were overstocks. They weren’t selling, so college student Michael Dell bought them up for a song and modified them on the cheap. Being IBM made products back in the days when IBM meant something, those early PCs were way overbuilt. Underclocked, so that they’d run cold and last forever. So he replaced the system clock, a 10¢ part, with a faster one. So his rebranded PCs ran 50% faster and cost 2/3 of IBM’s PCs. And he got rich. That’s the legend. Ah, but that was long ago and far away. Like all big business, Dell has long since gone multi-national. But even though they’re retrenching right now, Dell is still the greatest greatest tale ever told in the entire history of capitalism. 60 billion in annual sales. Crivens!

So I’ll have a Hecho PC. Just so long as it’s built with the English version of Windows, and the box not used to smuggle drugs in with. (shocked reaction!! Drew, that’s racist!! [no, it’s actually nationalist. Can we get past this stuck on stupid “racist” crap? Not all stereotypes are race based, and one blanket term does not cover them. Expand your mind, you simple monkey. {das raaaciss!!} Oh shut up.] )

Posted by Drew458     on 03/28/2013 at 09:35 AM   
Filed Under: • Computers and Cyberspace • Outsourcing •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(1)  Permalink •  

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