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	Phil's Blogservations Monday, November 18, 2002 Posted by philgomes 12:51 AM What American Tech-Heads Are Good At: I'm not going to make very many friends with this posting, but it's been something I've been talking about for some time. A recent article in cnet's news.com inspired me to write. The Baby Boomers and previous generations have been pretty much trained to accept a certain set of non-derogatory stereotypes as fact. I like to call these benign generalizations "industrial stereotypes." You've all heard 'em: Germans are supposed to be great engineers, Italians are supposed to be great cooks. Etc. etc. etc. But let's talk about how these are shaking out for the seamlessly integrated, feature-rich, robust, end-to-end-solution generation. Indians? Incredible programmers. Why do you think so much programming is going overseas to India? An educational system steeped in mathematics, combined with a resolute work ethic, has made India the place for software innovation. The Koreans and the Taiwanese are manufacturers par excellance. So much so, in fact, that many claim that the most recent set of DRAM price crashes was because companies like Hyundai and Samsung couldn't dial down their incredible manufacturing capacity fast enough. Industrial designers? That award goes to the Japanese. I mean, have you seen the consumer electronics stuff they come out with? Check out the latest stuff from Sony, as a representative example. I was at the Sony Style store the other day — the new Vaio series laptops and the digicam-enabled Clie PDAs are pretty hard to resist picking up. Now... What are we Americans good at? The answer: networking. We really get a charge out of making sure that one doodad can plug into another doodad. We like our fridges talking to the Internet. We want our cars to talk 802.11 to our toaster ovens. We're just not happy until everything is communicating with everything else. Now your phone can talk USB to your PC. Wow. Progress. | HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil's demented imagination. Hell, to be perfectly honest, even Phil disagrees with what he thinks sometimes. This site has virtually no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Clicking on a link doesn't automatically send a 1/2-cent donation to UNICEF. You can't buy, sell, auction, swap, find a date, win friends, influence people, cross the chasm, or decode the human genome using this site. You won't get free email. You won't win a free video game console. This site will not end world hunger, foster peace in the Middle East, help you smell better, teach you how to swing dance, or move the global economy from petroleum to hydrogen fuels. You'll learn a lot about this site's master, though, which amounts to a haphazard collection of strange and useless facts that pretty much won't help you at all.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This is the blog of Phil Gomes, SVP with Edelman Digital and senior advisor to the Society for New Communications Research. This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. Phil currently resides in Chicago, IL. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes.com View my page on PROpenMic SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. Any comments and trackbacks are the opinions of the individual writer of those comments and trackbacks, and not those of Phil Gomes, his employer, its clients, or its business partners. If you have a bone to pick, bug the people who wrote the comment or trackback.