美杂志声称中国已获“逆火” 并仿制远程轰炸机

美国军事评论员声称，中国空军目前已经获得12架俄制图-22E3“逆火”轰炸机，中国将通过对此研究来发展自身的大型远程洲际轰炸机。该评论员声称，由于俄罗斯没有同意把图160卖给中国，因此，中国短期内还不可能在实际意义上达到真正的洲际战略轰炸机的水平。

美国《航空》杂志刊载科洛菲尔评论员文章报道，中国早期研制的多种大型运输机由于技术贫乏遭到流产。但运-10大型运输机例外，这是中国早期设计的首批涡轮喷气是双发运输机。其设计性能介于早期的波音707-727之间，其原型机于70年代末期建造。

可以看出，中国早期就具有一定大型运输机设计能力。而运-8，运-9均来自于前苏联设计的安-12，并没有太多的更新化设计。运-9是中国目前在新近研制的中型客机，但仍然采用不利于扩展的涡轮轮浆发动机。

科洛菲尔声称，中国空军目前已经获得12架来自俄罗斯的图-22E3“逆火”轰炸机。中国采购此种轰炸机主要试图通过对此研究来发展自身的大型远程洲际轰炸机。但是由于俄罗斯没有同意把图-160卖给中国，因此，中国不太可能在近期内达到真正的洲际战略轰炸机的水平。

并且，因为图-22载荷能力远比俄罗斯图-160或者美国空军装备的B-1B轰炸机要小，甚至不及B-52轰炸机。但是图-22的远程空中突防能力很好，可以轻易突破多数欧洲国家的防空体系。
科洛菲尔声称，中国目前已经在试验一种类似美国“飞马M”空射火箭的武器，这是类似于AGM109G的空射型巡航导弹，可以在战区外实施突击打击。预计中国将在今后把这种导弹应用于图-22轰炸机。因此，在南中国海，中国将可以在空中战略打击上出现绝对威慑优势。

科洛菲尔认为，中国的举动对于平衡南亚和平局势，以及美国海空军在南亚势力存在位置十分不利，因此会引发新的一轮的亚洲南部军备竞赛。而中国从2006年开始重点关注远洋海域，并把主要目光放在“战略轰炸机＋航母舰队”以暂时弥补中国缺乏海外基地的窘迫。

而中国的大型飞机计划目前至少有3个项目在运作中，其中以早期名义命名运-10多用途客机就是其中项目之一。预计中国会借用法国技术来发展自主的大型飞机。而中国一些学者指出：中国没有必要在发展自己的大型客机，而对于远程洲际运输机中国更加不必去研制。

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
物有所不足，智有所不明
好学若饥、谦卑若愚
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
The full piece here and here the video from YouTube.

The VW Story

The VW Story

Autos The VW Story A look back at the successes and flops of Europe’s biggest car maker Autos News & Features By Marty Bernstein Every history, even a summary history, must have a beginning, a starting point if you will, of what will be-come a passing parade of events, dates, people and, in this instance, vehicles. This summary is no different, but does try to limit the length of the parade. Sometimes, there’s just too much information. The Early Years -- the 1930’s The time: sixty-nine years ago, May 28th, 1937. The place: Germany. The event: Automotive history was made with the founding of a new automobile company, the Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH, that, a little over a year later, became Volkswagenwerk GmbH. Thus began the formal story of Volkswagen. For many this date, indeed this event, marked the end of Germany’s World War I economic depression, but for many it was the beginning a very dark time. The clouds of World War II were forming, the subjugation and subsequent death of millions was only months away. According to unimpeachable sources, the real history of the Volkswagen began a few years earlier, on February 11, 1933. That is when Adolf Hitler, the new Chancellor of Germany made his first public speaking appearance at the Berlin Auto Show. Before a crowd of auto executives and the media (somethings never change do they?), Hitler revealed his plan for the “motorization” of Germany. The linchpins of this plan were construction of the first superhighway, the autobahn, and the idea of a new affordable car for everyone. Almost simultaneously, a talented German automotive designer, Ferdinand Porsche, was designing and building a prototype of an inexpensive, odd looking, yet sleek design, rear engine, air cooled, little vehicle that could hold five people. Porsche and Hitler had fateful meetings in 1933 and 1934, with Porsche promising to deliver proto-types within the year. Three handmade cars were delivered for testing and 30 more were built by Mercedes-Benz two years later. Then in 1938, after testing was approved building began for a new factory to manufacture the new Volkswagens. But in fact, few were produced; rather, military vehicles which included the Kubelwagen – literally, the German Jeep – was built in the new factory by slave labor. These vehicles did not carry the now famous VW circle logo with the V resting inside the W; they were known as KdF, the acronym for the German slogan, kraft durch freude, which means strength through joy. The War Is Over, Rebuilding Begins – the 1940’s During WWII, the factory, a source of military vehicles, was obviously a prime target for Allied bombers and did sustain heavy damage, but surprisingly was not destroyed. After the war was over, the British Army took control of the damaged factory under the supervision of Major Ivan Hirst. Under his watch, machines were rebuilt and repaired, the line reestablished, and the factory was brought up to speed. In an amazing feat of accomplishment, 2,000 vehicles were built in 1945 from parts found in the factory’s rubble. The following year, the Brit’s had pushed production up to 10,000 vehicles, renamed the company Volkswagen, and gave the factory town the name Wolfsberg, which was taken from the name of a local castle. But in typical end-of-war attitude, the British wanted to get out of the automobile business and sought to give control of the company to a qualified company. And here’s where it gets really interesting… Among those astute companies who turned down the open offer to take control of the company was the Ford Motor Company, who thought it would be a money drain. The French government gave an emphatic “mai no,” as did a long-gone British auto company, even Fiat said they’d pass. Bottom line? They could not give away the company to a going business. So, in 1949, they gave the whole kit and caboodle to the new German government in trust. With a new vigor and commitment, aided in part by the U.S. Marshall Plan, VW became a viable growing business. Factory improvements were made, new models were introduced (including, the Transporter aka the VW Bus), sales in Germany grew, exports to other European nations were developed, production steadily increased and new workers were hired. Life was getting good. Then, in 1949, the first VW’s were imported to the U.S. by an entrepreneur named Ben Pon, unfortunately, with little success. The reasons were many: American’s did not want a car that looked like a bug, the vehicle made a lot of noise, did not have a synchromesh transmission, much less chrome trim, nor did it have a radio or gas gauge, it wasn’t heated, and similar to Ford’s “Tin Lizzie,” it was only available in one color, grey. Sales were nil, partially due to a still lingering anti-German sentiment following the war. Big was better, bolder and more beautiful. American brands were the ranking royalty. Those Fantastic, Fabulous Days – The 1950’s in America Undaunted by its initial lack of success, Volkswagen made another effort in the early ‘50’s to sell in the U.S. market teaming up with the Hoffman Company, which began to import Volkswagen Beetles to America. This second attempt again resulted in little success, despite the fact a new export model had been introduced with chrome trim, various colors were available, as was a radio and manifold heater, but it still lacked a gas gauge. It did have a minuscule reserve tank, which was manually operated to switch from the regular tank when empty. It was in the mid-fifties that America and Americans underwent a significant change. It was a change in attitudes, mores, entertainment, customs and former habits that led to the enjoyment of peacetime and a vibrant economy. Times were good, even amid the Cold War and the Iron Curtain. The move to the suburbs had begun, the first shopping center was built, a college education was no longer unusual, the Dow Jones was in the low hundreds, the low hundreds! What is now called the Golden Age of Television – great variety, drama, kids shows and westerns – was underway on black and white sets, without remote controls. Limited broadcasts in color began in 1953. The NFL was barely mentioned on sports pages, baseball was king of sports broadcasting, boxing came in at a close second. The news lasted just 15 minutes. Presidential press conferences were not televised. Elvis cut his first Sun Record and rock and roll began. Broadway introduced musicals that still appear today. It was a period of consumer innovation and invention. Bell Labs created the first telephone answering machine, Super Glue came to the market, the double helix of DNA was discovered, the ubiquitous bar code, Velcro, the remote control and birth control pills were patented, the hula hoop was introduced, and man walked on the moon. Cars were more than a mode of transportation; Detroit proffered, presented and promoted them as a means of communicating status, wealth, position, and comfort albeit with tailfin design excess. The Edsel was introduced, as was power steering and radial tires. But it was also the beginning of non-conformity to an egalitarian norm. Sputnik beat America to space. The first Beatniks appeared on college campuses. Dirty books were no longer dirty, they were best selling, Pulitzer prize winning novels or books of poetry. Art was paintings of soup cans and splashes of paint. Then suddenly, almost miraculously and without any advertising, VW’s started to sell; first in college towns, then in a few major metro areas. Sales jumped from 2,000 units in 1953 to 150,000 in 1959. Who was buying Beetles? Trendsetters (early adapters we’d call ‘em today), iconoclasts, college professors and recent grads and people who demanded value, quality and function over style, design and perceived image. The VW business was better than good in Germany, it was booming, which was a boon to the West German economy that heavily relied on exports. Beetle’s, as they were then called, were being sold in Denmark, Sweden, Luxembourg, Belgium, Switzerland and the UK. New factories had been built in South Africa and Brazil to meet the growing demand. Then, in late 1959, Volkswagen decided to hire an advertising agency and … Automotive and Advertising History is Made – The 60’s A little known, New York advertising agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), whose claim to fame was a few ads they had created for the opening of a VW dealer on Long Island, and a handful of unique ads created by a Jewish owned agency for primarily Jewish clients – Orbach’s, a discount department store, Levy’s Rye Bread, El Al Airlines – won the Volkswagen account over more traditional ad agencies. A German company and a Jewish agency…conventional wisdom said, this was not a match, much less a marriage made in heaven. But this was not a conventional agency or a conventional client. The non-conformist VW executive in America who made this momentous decision was Carl Hahn, a man who several years later gained a Ghosn-like reputation and stature. Most automotive print advertising in those days was an imagined expression of what car companies and their ad agencies thought the world, automobiles and the people who owned and drove the specific brand should look like. Stretch it. Imagine, indeed invent a lovely situation and venue. Show beautiful people doing wonderful things in stylish, scenic or bucolic surroundings, and of course, all while they’re next to a car. Reality be damned. Look at All American Ads - 60’s edited by Jim Heimann and published by Taschen, you’ll see I’m not exaggerating. To the 50’s automotive advertising world of splashy colors, exaggerated drawings, paintings and renderings of vehicles that were married to dreary copy, laden with facts and clichés as well as features and perceived benefits, Doyle Dane brought not just freshness, but they invented a new form of advertising. One that is alive and thriving today. But then they had to. VW in the ‘60’s was essentially unknown. Those who had read or heard about the company knew it was German, the car inspired by Hitler, was founded to make cars for the Germans, using slave and concentration camp labor to build military vehicles during the war. This was not a minor obstacle to overcome or surmount back then as resentment still smoldered from WWII. So, how did DDB overcome this impediment to success? In a stroke of marketing super-genius … they ignored it! That’s right, not one VW ad from DDB ever spoke of its German heritage, history and association. The brand was literally invented in America in 1960 by the advertising – primarily print – at the time. There was no historical frame of reference ever. Contrast that with today, when German automotive heritage is a highly valued expression of excellence. The assets and attributes of the Beetle were simple: It was a cute (some called it an ugly car), well-made, durable little car that was inexpensive and represented a good value. The ads DDB created used these facts to create conversations with consumers that never used the words themselves, just the concepts. DDB was the first agency to use a creative team of writers and art directors, in most agencies the functions were separate. Teams of exceptional talents worked seamlessly to create amazing advertising. Even today, these Volkswagen Advertising Hall of Fame ads would still stand out and cut through the clutter. Just click on these links: Immediately, American consumers responded to the advertising by buying Beetles in ever-increasing numbers. Naturally, DDB kept up the onslaught of non-conventional, conversational advertising that has been called the greatest ad campaign ever. They were creative, unique and ideal for the time, circumstances and inherent issues. By the late ‘60’s, VW was producing over 1 million Beetles a year around the world. In 1968, a great year for VW, the brand had a 5% share of the U.S. new car market. But all good things must come to an end or at least a slow down. The World Was Changing but VW Was Slow to React – The ‘70’s & ‘80s The ‘70’s started out very well for Volkswagen. In 1970, VW sold 569,000 Beetles, the all-time high, which obviously made Volkswagen dealers happy and profitable. But not the manufacturers and dealers of domestic vehicles. Using their combined political clout, influence and pressure, trade quotas and tariffs were installed to stem the tide of imported vehicles. Yet, VW dealers responded in kind. During the record-setting year of 1970, 15 VW dealers met in Washington, D.C. to form the Volkswagen American Dealers Association. The purpose? To preserve a free market for imported international automobiles through political pressure and lobbying. It’s grown some since then. Today, this 11,000 member organization is known as the American International Automobile Dealers Association, or as most readers know it, AIADA. Even with slowing sales in America, on February 17, 1972, the Volkswagen Beetle broke the world car production record with an amazing 15,007,034 units produced worldwide. The Beetle had surpassed the legendary mark achieved by the Ford Motor Company’s famous Model T in quantity and in fewer years of production. But like Ford in the 1930’s, Volkswagen, 40 years later, needed to rev-up their bread and butter. And so it goes, the much gussied-up Super Beetles were introduced with lots of American touches, including air conditioning and McPherson struts. But a combination of the emergence of new competitors from Asia, the gas shortage in the early ‘70’s and a recession did not help the high mpg VW. Increasing governmental demands and regulations pushed the VW Beetle to the maximum a 40+ year old design could take. In 1977, production of the Beetle stopped and two years later production on the convertible also ceased in Germany. Oddly, the VW factory in Brazil kept making Beetles until the early ‘90’s and Mexico was making Beetles and shipping them to Germany almost until the end of the century. A near miss with bankruptcy in the early ‘70’s pushed the now public Volkswagen AG to develop new, more contemporary designs for both Europe and the U.S. markets. And thus, the Passat became the first of a new generation of VW’s. It was followed in 1974 by the Golf, which was known as the Rabbit in the U.S. (and whose return was just recently announced), the sporty Scirocco, Jetta and the GTI. Sales were on the rebound, but not to the extent or impact of the Beetle. The last Beetle in America was sold in 1977. Years of Coma and Malaise – The ‘80’s and ‘90’s In terms of historical reference to VW in America, these two decades were the least favorable, with the ‘80’s being the worst. The new VW vehicles suffered from intense competition from Toyota and Honda, whose cars were less expensive and rated higher in quality, reliability and durability. VW’s expensive factory in Pennsylvania was closed due to poor quality and low sales. The Golf 2 (Rabbit) was introduced as was the Corrado, with little success. Overall sales slipped badly, the company lost dealers. An odd advertising campaign based on a fake German word, “fahrvergnugen,” did not resonate with the public. Then in 1982, Carl Hahn the VW exec who had hired DDB as the agency years before was made president of the company. Under his watch, change and progress, often a slow process, began. The ‘90’s were transitional to Volkswagen; Germany was unified as a nation, but experienced labor unrest from guest workers from Turkey who feared for their jobs swelled. A memorial to workers during the war was unveiled in Wolfsburg and financial settlements were made to over 2,500 wartime workers in 26 nations. In 1991, a new design studio was opened in California with talented designers who would have a major impact a few years later. Business in America was still not good. But 1993, two major events occurred: Ferdinand Piech was made chief operating officer of Volkswagen and the two key designers at the California studio had developed designs for a new Beetle. After much internal discussion, the designs were approved. One year later at the 1994 North American International Automobile Show in Detroit, the newly designed Concept One was introduced. The reaction was amazing among automotive writers and the public. But it took over two years until 1996, before production began on the new Beetle. Internal planning for the launch of the new Beetle was handled by Steve Wilhite (now Nissan’s global vice president for marketing) and Liz Vanzura (who moved to head the intro of Hummer and now leads Cadillac’s marketing) and a new advertising agency, Arnold of Boston. A unique, innovative campaign with the theme, “Drivers Wanted” was launched, prior to the public introduction of the car in order to stimulate interest. In 1998, the New Beetle was debuted to the press and to the public. In just the first year, 55,802 New Beetles were sold in the U.S., and in 1999, the first full-year of production, 83,434 were sold. The car was a success, but had an added halo benefit – it changed the way American’s thought about VW – and correspondingly, helped to energize sales of the Passat and Jetta. The New Century: New Challenges, New Opportunities Momentum had been established, then sales of the New Beetle started to drop – a couple thou in 2000 to 81,134 and the next year sales plummeted to 60,891. The momentum was stalling. Updates and new models were introduced, including a new SUV called the Touareg and an uber-luxury VW sedan called the Phaeton. April 2006 sales just announced for VW are 20,528 units, a gain of 11.2% over 2005 April sales. First quarter sales were 73,824, an increase of 20.4 percent over prior year sales of 61,336. The Jetta continues to be the volume car for Volkswagen, selling 9,929 units, up 32.4 percent as compared to last year’s sales of 7,498. With an increase of 52.9 percent, the Passat sedan posted sales of 3,466. Changes in U.S. senior management were announced late last year, and just this year, two new model Volkswagens have been introduced, the GTI and a new Rabbit. Both have been launched with controversial advertising from a new advertising agency. Although, internal strife and management problems at VW headquarters in Germany have caused a bit of news coverage in recent months, last week a new management contract was signed by Dr. Bernd Pischetsrieder, chairman of the board of management, good thru April 16, 2012. Thus, resolving some of the issues. Is Volkswagen’s Past a Prologue to the Future? As the title of this summary history stipulated, Volkswagen has suffered trials and tribulations and enjoyed triumphs in its corporate history. Like the ancient legend of the Phoenix, VW seems to always rise from the ashes and adversity. Often to greater heights. Will the past be prologue? I think so. # # # Authors Acknowledgments: In writing this summary history of Volkswagen, I have relied upon numerous sources of information, data and expertise, including my own experience as owner of brand new 1960 and 1963 Volkswagens. Hours have been spent searching many of the thousands of sites devoted to VW history via Google, the company’s own websites to the Vintage Volkswagen Club of America historian Heinz Schneider. Special thanks and appreciation to Phil Patton for his book, Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World’s Most Famous Automobile and to Dave Kiley for his book, Getting the Bugs Out: The rise, fall and come-back of Volkswagen in America. Both were in my library prior to writing this article and are highly recommended reads to seeking a great source of information in the fascinating history of automobiles.

A Perpetual Crisis Machine

Jong-Yong Yun

A Perpetual Crisis Machine
Samsung's VIP Center is home to a uniquely paranoid culture--and that's the way the boss likes it.

By PETER LEWIS
September 19, 2005

(FORTUNE Magazine) – The guts of a next-generation digital video camcorder are splayed on a worktable near Sun Woo Song's desk, although to a visitor's eye they might as well be the innards of a notebook computer or a digital TV. Right now they are just a few slabs of green circuitboard attached to a life-support system consisting of an oscilloscope and a power supply. Song gestures proudly at the contraption, inviting me to imagine that it eventually can be folded like origami, sutured to a loading mechanism and a camera, infused with clever software, labeled with the Samsung logo, and delivered into the eager hands of consumers in time for ... Sorry, we can't say when project code-name Rainbow will emerge from Samsung Electronics as a real product.

Rainbow is top secret, just like the 30 or 40 other projects that will pass this year through Samsung's VIP Center for some meticulous fine-tuning or, sometimes, a wholesale reimagining.

Even at this early, concept stage, a small crisis has emerged. Management has sent Rainbow back to the drawing board, intensifying the already palpable sense of urgency. "We needed to enhance the product design," explains Song, senior engineer and leader of the 19-strong Team Rainbow. "The prototype needed more new ideas."

The big green sandwich of silicon and circuits has certainly come to the right place. The five-story VIP Center nestles amid the enormous factories and twin office towers that make up Samsung's industrial complex in Suwon, South Korea, a manufacturing town about an hour south of Seoul and not far from the spot where, in 1969, Samsung Electronics was founded in a Quonset hut. The VIP Center is best described as an invitation-only, round-the-clock assembly line for ideas and profits where Samsung's top researchers, engineers, and designers come to solve their grittiest problems. The ground floor houses big training rooms. Floors two through four are workrooms for the various teams. The top floor is reserved for the 42 dormitory rooms, each containing two beds, a shower, and a small desk and chair. There is a simple shared kitchen. In the basement is the fun stuff--billiards, Ping-Pong, gym, and sauna.

I wander past a meeting room where half a dozen casually clad engineers quietly manipulate their own facets of the consumer electronics puzzle. One team member sitting at his desk stares at a small loop of metal about the size of a silver dollar nestled in his hand, as if he were Hamlet contemplating Yorick's skull. In another room, five men sit around a central conference table, two of them pointing animatedly at a wall projection: "What? The power drain is 5.2 kilovolts? Not good enough! The goal is 4.9!" Other members of Team Rainbow toil quietly in their designated workspaces, knowing they will be testing their limits of endurance soon enough. In spite of an order to add more features while making it simpler, the original schedule for a final camcorder design prototype remains fixed and absolute.

The VIP Center is one of the reasons Samsung Electronics, once known as the maker of cheap black-and-white TVs, has become in less than a decade the world's dominant--and most profitable--consumer electronics company, knocking Sony from the top of the heap. At Samsung, speed equals success, and disaster lurks in every overlooked detail or missed deadline. According to the management philosophy laid out by vice chairman and CEO Jong-Yong Yun (everyone calls him vice chairman Yun), profits in the Digital Age are directly linked to being first to market. A delay in delivery takes a product one step closer to being a commodity, and when it comes to commodities, the low-cost Chinese manufacturers will eat your lunch noodles. Failure is not an option, especially in the VIP Center, a concrete-and-glass embodiment of Samsung's uniquely paranoid corporate culture. "Vice chairman Yun stresses that if you relax, if you become complacent, a crisis will find you," adds Kyunghan Jung, a senior manager of the VIP Center. "There is," he says, "a lot of tension here."

The VIP Center--which stands for Value Innovation Program, not Very Important Person--is definitely a guy's kind of hangout. The hospital-drab walls are decorated mainly by flow charts, timelines of technological achievement, and above every urinal in the men's room, a picture of a jet exploding into the side of the World Trade Center in New York City. (The Korean text over the pictures warns of the importance of maintaining top security and reminds the viewer that disaster can strike out of the blue.) A roll of toilet paper on a tray of fruit juices provides a low-cost alternative to napkins.

More than a dozen projects are underway in the VIP Center on the day of my visit, some expected to last a month, some as long as a year. I'm being allowed to tag along with two of them: the Eiger project, which has to reduce material costs on a new flatbed, multifunction printer by 30%; and Rainbow, which must trim the hundreds of steps needed to manufacture a new camcorder by 25%.

Once through the front door and past the security guards, climbing the stairs of the building reveals door after door after closed door marked with code names: Hinan, Mosel, Porsche, Elle. The various teams closeted within could be working on a new liquid-crystal display TV or a problem with semiconductor yields or maybe just a way to eliminate one function from an air-conditioner control panel. While the objects of their attention vary widely, the team members at the VIP Center have one thing in common: Their bosses have vowed in writing--etched in metal on a plaque that hangs on the wall--to keep them in the VIP Center until they have solved their particular problems. If that means spending the night, so be it. Although team members may go home to sleep if they want to, Samsung executives acknowledge--with obvious pride--that the building is occupied 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And even if they don't sleep over, 18- to 20-hour days are not uncommon. "When people are told they have to come here, they know they have to come up with results in a very, very short time," says Song, a veteran team leader. "This is not a prison," one engineer tells me, "but it's not a volunteer job either."

In April the managers invited the wives of Team Rainbow's researchers--of the 39 original members, only one is female--to the VIP Center to explain that their husbands were coming home late or not at all because they were working and sleeping in the dorm.

"Our wives were complaining," recalls Jaehoon Koo, a software specialist and VIP Center veteran who moved his family to Suwon in order to be able to sleep in his own bed, if for only a few hours a night. "We called a meeting to soothe and comfort the family members, to remind them how important this project is and why it is needed for the husbands to work so hard." And why is that? "We're building the foundation for the new generation of camcorders," Koo explains.

Doosik Joo, a father of three and a five-time VIP alumnus, has a different explanation. "People say, 'You've spent all your life there, and what have you done?'" he says. "I can say, 'I drove down costs, created more value for the customer.' Sure, maybe we work more than the normal eight hours, but because we do, the next generation may only have to work eight hours. We do it not only for our company and our families, but also for our country."

Working and living in the VIP Center is not just geek macho. "Seventy percent to 80% of quality, cost, and delivery time is determined in the initial stages of product development," says Jung, the crisis-conscious senior manager whose business card also identifies him as a certified value specialist. He's one of the 50 or so "core members" of the VIP Center staff who work to support the teams assembled from across the company, all determined to engineer value into Samsung's next-generation products. The company's obsession with reducing complexity early in the design cycle is one reason Samsung Electronics has lower manufacturing costs, higher profit margins (an industry-leading 21% last year), quicker time to market, and, more often than not, more innovative products than its competition.

But for Yun (pronounced yoon), nothing breeds failure quite like success. And Samsung Electronics has had a lot of successes lately. It's the world's leading maker of memory chips, flat-panel LCD displays, and color televisions, and it's battling Motorola to be the world's No. 2 maker of mobile phones, behind Nokia. Last year it earned more than $9 billion on $72 billion in sales, good by any standard but remarkable for a manufacturing company. It has twice the market capitalization of Sony, which has long served as a Samsung role model. Hardly a week goes by in which Samsung fails to announce a "world's first" or "world's biggest" or world's something-or-other product. In recent months Samsung has unveiled a seven-megapixel digital camera phone, an 82-inch LCD display, a 102-inch plasma HDTV, a phone that receives satellite television broadcasts--the list goes on and on.

Most telling, a humbled Sony turned to Samsung last year to help it gain a foothold in the flat-panel TV market, and earlier this summer the British market-research firm Interbrand calculated that Samsung's global brand value--defined as the present value of the brand's future earnings--had actually passed Sony's for the first time. The reversal can be attributed in part to a decline in Sony's fortunes, but since Yun restructured the business in 1997, no other global company's brand equity has grown faster.

Marketing and design are critical factors in Samsung's rise, of course, but the bedrock of Samsung's growing global presence, and the reason it is likely to stay No. 1 even if rivals steal a march from time to time, is the sheer depth and scale of its technical research. No other tech company--not Intel, not Microsoft, not Sony--spends a higher percentage of revenue on R&D than Samsung does: 8.3% last year, or $4.6 billion, rising to more than 9% this year. (The company has nearly 27,000 researchers, out of a total workforce of 113,600, including some 2,400 Ph.D.s and 8,600 with master's degrees, working in 17 research centers around the globe.) And while Asian competitors cut capital expenditures and R&D spending to weather the Asian financial crisis of 1997, Samsung boosted its already high investment in new technologies. Those investments put it in position to dominate today's hot markets--LCD TVs, multimedia mobile phones, and memory chips. Even if you don't own a Samsung-branded product, there's probably a bit of Samsung in whatever device you do own: Apple iPods, Dell computers, Microsoft Xboxes, Nokia phones, Sony PlayStation Portables--name your favorite gadget.

For Yun, a scholarly 61-year-old engineer who looks to history and philosophy books for inspiration, this growing list of No. 1's are so many more reasons not to celebrate. In his monthly speeches to employees he invariably warns that Samsung is in a crisis every bit as severe as the one that nearly destroyed the company in 1997. Back then, memory chips provided 50% of the profits of Samsung Electronics and 35% of the total revenue of Samsung Group, the family-owned chaebol, or conglomerate, of which Samsung Electronics is the largest division. But in 1996 the memory-chip business began to implode as supply outstripped demand. Samsung Electronics had taken on prodigious debt to expand in chips, and as prices fell, the company reeled.

Today, says Yun, "we stand at the crossroads to becoming a world leader or a major failure." There are, in fact, unsettling similarities to the late-1990s crisis. Now, as then, a record year for profits presaged a collapse in prices for almost all of Samsung's key products; profits and market growth in mobile phones are shrinking, and the 15% rise of Korea's won against foreign currencies in the past year has withered profit margins for a company that gets 80% of its revenue from exports. First-quarter profits this year were down 52%, followed by a 46% decline in the second quarter. On top of that, the South Korean economy is stagnant, labor unrest is on the rise, and Samsung Group executives are mired in a scandal involving slush-fund payments to politicians. There are even public protests against Samsung's overwhelming dominance of the Korean economy. Looming over all is China, simultaneously Samsung's biggest potential market--and competitive threat. Yun's paranoia is not some managerial affectation.

To understand Samsung's hunger for success, it's necessary to understand South Korea. Brutalized by the Japanese military occupation during the first half of the 20th century and almost completely destroyed in the 1950s war that divided the country, South Korea had one of the world's poorest economies in the 1960s and lacked the industrial infrastructure, particularly the manufacturing and electronics expertise, that Japan and other Asian countries developed after World War II. When the three-year-old Samsung Electronics Co. began selling black-and-white TVs in Korea in 1972, Sony was already a brand globally admired for its high-quality transistor radios, tape players, and Trinitron color TVs.

By 1995, Samsung--the name means "three stars" in Korean--was making memory chips and other components that helped power the high-tech products of brand-name Japanese and American companies. Its own Samsung-branded consumer-electronics business focused on making commodity products cheaply. That year, celebrating the group's growing success, Kun-Hee Lee, the chairman and son of the Samsung Group's founder, gave Samsung mobile phones to friends and key workers. Within days, however, he was receiving complaints that the phones were defective. Embarrassed, he ordered the entire inventory from the Gumi factory that had built the phones--$50 million worth--to be piled in a giant heap in the factory's courtyard. Under banners proclaiming that Samsung would from then on be known as a maker of quality goods, Lee, his top managers, and 2,000 employees watched as workers smashed 150,000 wireless handsets, cordless phones, and fax machines with hammers and threw the pieces into a bonfire. "A defect is a cancer," Lee proclaimed. It marked the beginning of the company's transformation into a respected global brand.

As semiconductor prices plunged in 1996, Lee realized that Samsung Electronics would have to diversify beyond the cyclical memory-chip business. So in December 1996 he tapped Jong-Yong Yun as president and CEO and exhorted him, "Change everything except your spouse and children."

Yun had barely begun to formulate a strategy when the 1997 Asian meltdown hit. Spooked Western investors staged the equivalent of a run on Asian stocks, currencies, and assets, wreaking havoc in markets across Asia and driving Samsung to the brink of bankruptcy. Yun acted quickly and boldly. He dumped dozens of non-core businesses, fired nearly one-third of the workforce--shocking in the Korean chaebol culture of lifetime employment--and bet the company on the emerging world of digital technologies. "Sometimes," says Yun, who's fond of speaking in Confucian-esque aphorisms, "the lizard has to sacrifice its tail to survive."

This period saw him crystallize what he calls his "sincere management" philosophy: Cut costs for short-term competitiveness. Spend on research in core technologies for long-term competitiveness. Don't enter new markets or product lines unless there's a real chance to become No. 1. Ruthlessly cut any business that does not earn the company a growing profit. Be the first to get innovative products to market. Constantly refine supply-chain and decision management. Adapt quickly. Put quality first.

Yun decided that Samsung had to control its own destiny and not just copy others if it was to transform itself into a 21st-century power. Dissecting the iconic products of the emerging Digital Age--computers, cellphones, CD players, and the like--Yun identified core technologies common to them all: semiconductors, large-area LCDs, display drivers and chip sets, and mobile telephony. This focus gave the company a big advantage. Although Sony and other rivals had a huge head start in consumer electronics, that lead was based in the analog world. The digital world required new skills and technologies, Yun realized, and it was suddenly a level playing field. (It wouldn't be for long.)

About the same time, the South Korean government began a concerted effort to propel the nation to the cutting edge of information technologies, building a national broadband Internet network that today is unmatched in the world. The growing digital infrastructure gave Samsung a vast, real-world laboratory for testing new products and services. And into this churning environment, the VIP Center was born.

Inside the VIP Center the day never begins, because it never really ends. And although weekends are officially encouraged, all the team members know that as deadlines approach, Saturdays and Sundays--and time with their families--can evaporate. "The calendar on the wall here at VIP Center says Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday, Friday," Team Rainbow's Jaehoon Koo jokes.

"Currently for the design team it is a very busy time," Koo says, which is a VIP euphemism for very little sleep. "Next it will be the circuit team. Then the software team." And software time means the 35-year-old Koo may not be going home for a while. Although his rule is to go home at night--even if it's 4 A.M. and he has to be back at dawn--at crunch time the dorm rooms are "necessary for the success of the program. In the VIP Center it's very easy to work, very good for the early stages of a project," he says. There are no distracting phone calls, no messy administrative tasks. All the critical team members are within shouting distance, and with everyone working on the same project in the same room, arranging meetings on short notice is a snap. The VIP Center support team is always available to lend a computer-aided engineering specialist, a modular-design expert, mechanical engineers, and quality specialists.

The critical nature of teamwork becomes evident late one morning as the Rainbow team leader, Sun Woo Song, is focused on the mother of all spreadsheets, the one he maintains with hundreds of color-coded mini-deadlines and links showing how one facet of the project is connected to another. He's found a bottleneck: key coding. The buttons on the camcorder can't be programmed until the software is complete. But technically it's doable; it's mainly a juggling act with clocks and calendars.

As he struggles with the schedule, I pop in on Project Eiger; it's winding down its stint in the VIP Center and has fewer than ten members at the moment. The prototype on the worktable is actually recognizable as an all-in-one flatbed printer, scanner, and copier. I joke through my translator that it must have been zapped with Samsung's ultra-top-secret shrinking ray gun. These guys become visibly nervous at the mention of the phrase "ultra-top-secret shrinking ray gun," as if I've discovered a trade secret. Indeed, secrets at the VIP Center are so guarded that one engineer asks me not to write "new laser printer" or "next-generation camcorder." "It could cause big damage to our competitive nature," he says.

The tightly wound engineer leaves, perhaps to stare at the picture of the plane taking down Tower Two, and I get to talk with Byung Sun Ahn, who has logged more hours in the VIP Center than almost anyone else. "I like to think of the VIP Center as a smaller version of NASA," says Ahn, 45, the principal engineer and project manager for the Eiger team. He worked on one of the first VIP projects back in 1998 and 1999 and has led several teams. "You know, everyone in the same room, looking up at the same big screen. The place is designed for smooth communications and fast decision-making."

"In the U.S., everyone has their own small cubicle, their own space," Ahn continues. "Here we each have our own desks around the walls, but there's a big central table. You can see from people's expressions how they're doing. We're able to communicate efficiently in real time. When we gather around the table, we're like NASA, all specialists working together and looking at the same big screen."

The specialists come not only from Ahn's digital printing division, but also from the core VIP Center staff. The sponsoring group--digital video in the case of Rainbow, digital printing for Eiger--pays all the development cost, while the VIP Center provides the dorm facilities, the food, and the training, a key part of the VIP Center experience. That takes me downstairs to the TRIZ room.

TRIZ is a Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. It's a curious throwback from the Stalin-era Soviet Union that has proven unexpectedly effective in the hands of Samsung's single-minded capitalists. Some 60 years ago a Russian patent clerk, Genrich Altshuller, who had studied thousands of submissions, decided that there were patterns of innovation common to the evolution of scientific and technical advances, and that inventiveness could be taught just like, say, reading or arithmetic. He developed the TRIZ method, which uses some 200 different exercises to help develop creative problem solving and is based on the concept of resolving contradictions. It is so popular among Samsung product designers that TRIZ team leader, Jun-Young Lee, is developing a multimedia training tool to reach thousands of engineers instead of the couple of hundred or so who can schedule personal training sessions at the VIP Center. His team includes two Russians, Eduard Kurgi and Yury Danilovskiy, who are specialists in the technique.

"When something gets better, it can also get worse," Jung, the VIP Center senior manager, explains. Chairman of the Samsung Electronics Fishing Club, the affable Jung turns to angling for an example. "The fishing line has to be thin enough so the fish doesn't notice it," he starts. "But it also has to be strong enough so it doesn't break when you catch the fish. In that case, you make the fishing line flat, so it appears thin, while the flatness gives it strength."

Recognizing a fellow geek, I try to make a connection. His TRIZ explanation is exactly the premise for the thin ribbon of nanoparticles envisioned for a proposed space elevator that would lift small payloads into orbit, I say.

"Yes, fishing is very scientific," Jung agrees.

In any event, TRIZ is by no means unique to Samsung; hundreds of companies--including competitors like Philips, LG, and Motorola--use it too. At the VIP Center, however, the goal is to train every engineer and researcher in the company in TRIZ think. It's employed to evaluate such things as whether a button can be removed from, say, a new camcorder. Removing the button can save lots of money in manufacturing costs, but only if the loss of function is acceptable to the consumer, and only if it takes the camcorder design one step closer to perfection. TRIZ has been useful in increasing the yield of semiconductor factories, designing new motors for washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and increasing the viewing angle of LCD TVs. Collaborating with TRIZ specialists, engineers who are accustomed to attacking technical problems in the traditional linear fashion often come up with breakthroughs.

"We put ideas on the table, they put ideas on the table, and we go from there," says Lee, the TRIZ specialist. "If it's a good idea, we patent it." And, since the VIP Center was created in the late 1990s, Samsung's growth in good ideas, measured in patents, has risen faster than any of its competitors--1,600 last year.

For all his successes, there's one thing missing from Yun's executive bio: a lovable, iconic product on the level of Apple's iPod or Sony's Trinitron. Despite the company's advanced technology, increasingly innovative designs, and TRIZ, it's hard for Americans to think of a single product that's closely identified with the Samsung brand. And to stay atop the consumer-electronics business, Samsung needs not only flawless execution but also a blockbuster--one that is sexier than an Internet- enabled refrigerator. Maybe it will be an advanced mobile phone, or a portable MP3 music player. Yun says that by the end of next year Samsung will displace Apple's iPod from its leadership position. In the meantime Yun has his current crisis to get through, especially dealing with the beating Samsung is taking in its main businesses of memory chips and LCD panels.

Given how quickly Samsung learns and the sheer force of its R&D, the company looks as if it has built the foundation to lead markets for the indefinite future. Today Samsung Electronics ranks No. 1 in the world in eight product categories, including flash memory chips, computer monitors, big LCD screens, and CDMA mobile phones. Yun's goal is to double the No. 1 rankings in three years and triple them in five years. The company's seventh-generation LCD factory is producing high-definition screens the size of a king-size bed. The Korean won is strengthening against the dollar, Samsung is buying back $2 billion of its own stock, and the lights still burn all night at the VIP Center.

In other words, vice chairman Yun sees potential disaster just around the corner. He acknowledges that he rarely misses a chance to remind even his top executives of the perils that, he says, could sink Samsung Electronics at any turn, even in its finest hour, even though he's rung the crisis bell 1,000 times before. "You love your wife, but you still have to tell her that you love her every day," he says.