I don't know how much real innovation can happen there that the Chinese haven't done. In fact the Chinese haven't really innovated, that have optimized existing processes. Think about it: If you break it down: a "2-week-long back-and-forth with sales and engineering for a basic prototype run" is the same stuff happening in the background as the "get an instant quote and order in 5 minutes"...just much faster.
Thats not the innovation I was talking about: Let me give an example. When the Xbox was being developed, there was a push within Microsoft to create a standard CD‑based game console that was a more refined version of the existing competitors. The Xbox team pushed back and said: No, you don't enter a market and just copy the incumbents. You need to do something different and differentiated. So they innovated by adding a hard drive and standard networking to every console. The addition of these components as standard in each console opened up a new paradigm of gaming with Xbox Live and was a different vision compared to what the others were offering at the time. They eventually ended up moving the market in a fundamental way.
Now, going back to manufacturing, how do we translate that to PCB manufacturing? Again, I don’t know how you could possibly truly innovate the pipeline process more than it has already been done. Even just adding an AI‑handled pipeline process, it's just further optimizing what has already been done. There may or may not be an opportunity to truly move the market but if there is, then thats something the West can do to really compete.
>I don’t know how you could possibly truly innovate the pipeline process more than it has already been done
There are things China does well, things the US does well, and a lot of people building stuff for fun. Yet doing business in North America can be just as challenging for different "reasons". =3
Thats not the innovation I was talking about: Let me give an example. When the Xbox was being developed, there was a push within Microsoft to create a standard CD‑based game console that was a more refined version of the existing competitors. The Xbox team pushed back and said: No, you don't enter a market and just copy the incumbents. You need to do something different and differentiated. So they innovated by adding a hard drive and standard networking to every console. The addition of these components as standard in each console opened up a new paradigm of gaming with Xbox Live and was a different vision compared to what the others were offering at the time. They eventually ended up moving the market in a fundamental way.
Now, going back to manufacturing, how do we translate that to PCB manufacturing? Again, I don’t know how you could possibly truly innovate the pipeline process more than it has already been done. Even just adding an AI‑handled pipeline process, it's just further optimizing what has already been done. There may or may not be an opportunity to truly move the market but if there is, then thats something the West can do to really compete.