Permanent Etchings: Made in Taiwan

"How did Taiwan emerge as an electronics workshop to the world? The island has an abundance of relatively low-cost engineers, many of them returnees from the U.S., and strong connections to Silicon Valley. The Taiwan government stimulated the high-tech industry with tax and venture capital incentives. The country has a deeper technical and industrial base than its Southeast Asian neighbors. Taiwan's entrepreneurs have been much more adaptable than its competitors in Japan and Korea to the rapid change and short product cycles in the computer industry.

Taiwan has not been notably successful in branding and marketing its own products. Where it has succeeded is in partnering with the U.S. (and, increasingly, Japanese) computer industry. While being careful not to advertise what they are doing, the U.S. name-brand owners have delegated a lot to the Taiwanese. The brand holder may give a road map, such as product specifications and performance. Or the Taiwan side may generate the ideas and bring them to the customer. Taiwan has a particular strength in the time-consuming design of the printed circuit board, a customized system that is crucial to the overall speed and reliability of the finished computer. A joint development process between the two sides can come up with a new model in six to nine months.

Lam says that Quanta, which has 500 design engineers in Taiwan, did about half of the design work for Apple Computer's G4 notebook. For Dell, Quanta's biggest single customer, Lam says, his army of engineers does about 60% to 70% of the design work on Latitude models; Dell does the remaining 30% to 40%. He asserts that HP was a marginal player in notebooks before Quanta helped to design its products. Compaq, which last year sourced an astounding $9.6 billion of electronics from Taiwan, looks to become Quanta's No. 2 account. "

(...)

"Taiwan's electronics factories started out at the drone end of the business. But there wasn't enough money in that. In the past decade they have evolved from lowly con-tract manufacturers into designer-manufacturers. They differ from the well-known contract electronics manufacturers in the U.S.—namely, Solectron and Flextronics—in typically having a few specialties, as opposed to making a wide variety of products. In Quanta's case the list includes laptops, and now cell phones and servers."

{ Shows how important being focused is. I, on the other hand, am learning it the hard way.}

- Forbes article Made in Taiwan

This [emphasized] explains why the Chinese are and need to be fashionable.

Also, 'tis helps to notice that the government had a major part to play, in helping setting up this industry in Taiwan. Governments can play a major role if they want to. They should've let Tata open his plant in Singur.