It may be to a companies financial benefit to move production to a lower cost country as long as the the product as presented to the customer has enough quality to please the customer.

BUT, if a shoddy product is presented to the customer, woe be unto the manufacturer for the dissatisfied customer with taketh his or her business elsewhere, badmouthing this company far and wide.

For example, I purchased an IBM hard drive a couple of years ago (a GXP75 series, I think). It worked fine for a few months, then major data errors happened. IBM replaced it under the 3 year warranty. Since then, I have found out that this series of drive has had a MUCH greater rate of failure than other IBM drives and non-IBM drives. Of course IBM is doing the Cleopatra act (queen of de-nile). IBM has replaced my filed drive with a refurbished (one that has already failed but was fixed) version of the same drive.

I have lost faith in IBM and their drives. I have not purchase another IBM drive and have not recommended IBM to others.

Once a customer loses faith in a manufacturer, all the corporate spin in the world will not get it back.

So, if companies outsource their manufacturing to low cost countries and do not maintain any sort of quality assurance check on the product, they are asking for disaster. This is assuming the basic design itself is sound.

Paul

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the 1derful1