Excuse me while I vomit.

[pulsator-power]

Vomit

Getting back to the original premise, can you imagine going to Home Depot & puking right in front of the GE's

 

[Ken_moore]

I believe!

Greetings! GE: We bring good things to death...I should start by saying I dislike how GE profits through defense contract spending. Then there's that whole blood-sucking leach on the world economy known as "financial services" in which GE is a big player. Don't even get me started on Welch and that modern business cult of six sigma. Despite all this, they do still make appliances, and thats what we need to focus on. In fact, given that they're the "deepest pockets" of any of the big 4, I bet they have whole rooms full of lawyers approving a press release like the one linked in the OP. If they say they're the most reliable washers, they wouldn't risk the false advertising claims that would result if that were not demonstrable through a phalanx of research. I believe them.

Look at the CR reliability ratings. Remember where GE was 3 years ago? The worst. By far the worst. Ridiculously bad. In the most current rankings, they're middle of the pack. Statistically, you'd have to be making some pretty reliable machines right now to make such a jump in the ratings. The changes would have to be made 3+ years ago to make a difference now, so maybe that six sigma crap actually worked. Maybe they looked at the worst-ranking performance for laundry products and actually did something about it. Now, they're reaping the rewards.

I don't think there was transference of the FL ranking to the TL rankings. Although I don't think CR subscribers are the brightest lot in the world, hopefully they can tell which kind of machine they have.

Yes, they're an American manufcaturer. Sort of. They're a multinational corporation. Most of their laundry products are made in Canada, not the USA. Close enough? I'm saddened to see all these Asian imports flooding the market, and I think its important to buy American. Do any GE's qualify?

Regards,
Ken

 

[steved]

My understanding is that the appliance division hasn't been fairing too well, and has been for sale for sometime now.... it is not unlike them to just dispose of anything that isnt profitable; I know this from growing up in GE's home town of Schenectady, NY. Jack Welsh said if the EPA forced GE to clean up the PCB's in the Hudson River, he would pull totally out of NY. They have torn down several buildings at the main plant over the past few years, with the workforce down to about 2500, from over 40,000 in the early 50's.... things that make you say "hmmm".

 

[peterh770]

The tools for our national defense have to come from somewhere. If not GE, who is also a leader in medical technology, then from someone else. All washer manufactures were put on hold for national defense in the 1940's, and we won that one for Europe, so hat's off to GE for helping our troups and keeping us safe.

Maybe GE's jump in ratings so quickly isn't from that rapid an increase in reliability, but rather from other manuacturers' products becoming poor more quickly.

The old Filter-Flo style was discontinued for a variety of reasons. Having 6 of them in my laundromat, I think the main reason was that they saw Energy Star restricitons coming their way and knew that there was no possible way the design could compete. Remember, in that design there is about 2-3 inches between the inner tub and the wash basket, all the way around, and even more at the bottom. The amount of water it takes to fill that thing - twice! - is just out of this world. Yes, they wash good, yes they spin good, yes they take abuse wonderfully, but those washers could irrigate the state of Iowa with every wash cycle! There is also very, very little plastic or aluminum in the machine; it's all heavy metal and porcelain. The only consistant problem I have had with mine is the oil seal in the transmissions failing, and even then replacing the transmission in a GE is very, very easy to do. But they had to change, just like WP and MYG had to change. And now it seems that companies are only interested in shareholder return instead of consumer image and product quality.

 

[tolivac]

I know this is a little off the topic-but sort of interesting-the SW transmitters I use at my workplace came from the GE factory in electronics Park-Syracuse NY. Wonder if this plant is still in use?Many of their commercial broadcast transmitters were built there as well.AM,FM and Television.The transformers used in the transmitters I use came from the GE transformer factory in Pittsfeild Mass.This I know has been closed down.Major PCB cleanups there.The SW transmitters I use werte built in the early 60's.Still going strong today.They were part of a Govt contract.
GE's defense division-Someone has to build the weapons and military equipment needed to defend our country-and preseve our freedom.Weapons are another interest to me besides appliances-despite their use for death and destruction-the weapons are interesting devices.Just about ANY major US company is involved in some sort of govt contracts in building weapons and other defense products.-Its not just GE.
I would think the GE Filter Flo design could be modified to meet water requiments.And yes I am willing to pay for sturdier sheet metal and other parts.Its still too bad about the PCB pollution GE caused-as well as other el;ectronic and electrical manufacturers.At those times PCB's weren't considered dangerous.It wasn't until the early 70's when the danger was apperent.And yes some PCB equipment may still be in use-Look up on the nearest utility pole--that old "pole pig" transformer may contain PCB's.GE and Westinghouse made thousands of them.Many still in use.Some substation transformers contain it as well.Grandfathered under the laws.Its just when the PCB containing device fails-it has to be disposed of by a licensed PCB disposal company.And oh-yes many PCB caps in use as well.Don't want to frighten anyone-the devices are pretty reliable.The owner just has to monitor them for leakages or other problems.Same with broadcast transmitters still in use that may have PCB containing transformers and caps.Have had to deal with those.

 

[bwoods]

GE

I work at Wright State University in Dayton, OH and we have several students who have done co-op at GE Appliance Park in Louisville, KY. And we have one who got employed there full time. Since I am very interesed in appliances I always talk to the students in great length at GE. For the most part, the Appliance Park employees and administration are very very dedicated and loyal to GE and are committed to producing high quality appliances. However, they are quite frustrated at getting little support and research money from the top dogs in the corporation. It all started in 1980 with Welch who was a chemical engineer (and a bad one). His goal was to take GE from a manufacturing organization to a service organization. He first sold the AC division to Trane in 1982 (Welch admitted he hated AC) and then the housewares division in 1984 to Black and Decker (He thought GE making things like peeling wands and mixers was silly for a giant corporation). In 1986/87 he sold and partially traded the TV and electronics division to Tompson in France. He used the monies from these sales to purchase NBC and further boost the financial services division. If you remember he even changed the GE logo from the script GE in the circle to a printed GE (like on top of the GE building in New York. This was the only time he backed down when there was such an outcry to his deleting of the historical GE trademark. His goal was to build his ego by changing the company the way he wanted. In choosing his succesor, Jeff Immet, he search hard to find a clone who would continue to alter the company and reform it the way he wanted. He found the ideal person in Immelt who continues to do Welch's will. Immelt is not even an engineering. He has an MBA and cares nothing about appliances, electronics, etc. Welch continues to be on the payroll of GE and serve as a "consultant". He is a svengali who continues to make Immelts diecisions. As someone mentioned in the thread, he is trying to sell the appliance division AND has been working with A.O. Smith on the sale of the motors division.

It's extremely sad to see GE going the way Westinghouse did, selling off their limbs. Westinghouse went out of business. GE will too one day. The financial services division is too dependent on the economy. Look how much money GE lost on it's insurance division when the World Trade Center collapsed. They will be sorry if they sell off their appliance division.

No matter how bad the economy, people have to wash their clothes. They have to cook food, etc. Their housewares division and electronics division were making small, but consisstent profits, but Welch didn't like them. Even in bad economic times people can afford toasters, blenders for themselves and there are always wedding and Christmas gifts, etc. And of course will watch TV.

Sorry if I sound bitter, but I love GE, am a stockholder and all my appliances have always been GE. Their appliances, both large and small, were always creatively designed and engineered to last. But the company is slowly being ruined by people (Welch and Immelt) trying to shape it in their own image. No one thought Westinghouse would go belly up, but GE is on the same path. There finances look strong now, but after all their major manufaturing limbs have been removed (I soon expect Immelt to sell of the lighting division also) they will have nothing to keep them afloat during bad economic time.

If their appliances currently are not what they used to be, blame the little, stuttering, loud mouthed runt, Welch and his syncohant, Immelt. Welch did not want GE to be known as the General Electric Company anymore, that's why he changed the name to the GE corporation so they would not be associated with Electricity, appliances, manufacturing, etc. GE was created to produce household and commercial appliances and equipment. That's what the coorporation was for, not for boosting stockholders shares. Let's hope one day an engineer whol loves appliances and electronics becomes CEO and maybe GE can return to its fomer glory. The above is my personal opinion, of course, but I am sure many of you are saddened also, by GE's decline in the appliance industry.

Barry Woods

 

[coldspot66]

I knew things started to go south when Welch took the helm. The rotary compressor fiasco of the mid '80's was the first of GE's appliance woes. Too bad they want to get away from their "core" business. Have you read "A Walk Through The Park"? A history of Appliance Park from it's beginings in 1951. Fascinating chronilogical history of GE!

 

[Designgeek]

Sad to hear about GE under Welch. Ad-hominems about his height or possible speech disabilities don't do the case justice though.

What you're describing is the classic go-go 80s & 90s business model, switching from dealing with physical "stuff" to dealing with financial "stuff" as far divorced from physical matter as can be; combined with the risk-management mentality (which I personally call "corporate cowardice"); combined with the switchover from managers with line background (operations) to managers with staff backgrounds (finance).

Strictly speaking, the legally-required nature of any publicly-traded corporation is to maximize shareholder value. The place where the real identity of a corporation comes into being, is how they go about doing that. For example under the old-school model, by making the highest-quality or lowest-cost or best-cost-for-price appliances possible. By demonstrating concern for something beyond the bottom line, something to do with quality or value or innovation or corporate citizenship.

Brand equity was based on something real and tangible, in a society where "word of mouth" (brand recommendations from family and friends) was a much more prevalent component of the bottom line than it is in these media-overdosed times. Today brand equity is another element that's been studied to death, to the point where it can be manipulated as an independent variable. Which is to say, there are ways to create entirely fictitious brand equity that is based on exactly nothing of substance. Nike is the prime example of this one: all about image, all about slick TV advertising, and in reality what you have is merely a halfway decent pair of sneakers made by child labor in sweatshops.

There are a few good examples of the oldschool way still around. Microsoft, interestingly enough, is one: Gates after all was a geek from the beginning, and despite Microsoft's other problems, it's still basically a geek shop. Apple is another, and has stood by the old model of producing its own hardware to high standards. I'm willing to venture that Ford is another; still in family management, by the family that brought the motorcar to the world; no other family or management group in the world is probably as thoroughly saturated with expertise about every detail of the engineering and financial aspects and history and legacy of that industry. (Imagine how it would feel to know that your name is on probably tens of millions of cars and trucks around the world, hmm!)

I may as well weigh in on defense contracting while I'm at it. IMHO it's perfectly OK, and if it's done right, it's an honorable industry. If it's done wrong or corruptly, it's a near-treasonous scandal. So we have to count on having arms manufacturers who play by the rules and produce ordnance that performs properly. Not only for the sake of our own troops who use the stuff, but also in this era of increasingly precise weaponry, for the sake of civilians who happen to get caught in war zones.

Last but not least about GE: GE Wind produces the largest multi-megawatt wind turbines in North America, topping out (last time I checked) at 4.8 megawatts. When one of those is installed in a class 5 wind area, it can power nearly 5,000 houses. But of course when you're building a wind farm, you don't install just one, you install tens or hundreds of them. GE used to produce nuclear power reactors in the USA also (may still be doing so for overseas installations), hopefully they will start doing so again; we need all the non-fossil energy we can get right now.

Bwoods, do you know anything about GE's chances of getting back into nuclear? Franky a couple of new gigawatt-size reactors would go a long way toward undoing some of Welsh's other sins, and could open the doors to a few hundred more gigawatts that we're going to need -for starters- as world oil production peaks some time in the next ten years.

 

[tolivac]

GE

GE is still servicing the Nuclear plants they built and installed for overseas customers.Would like to see more of the nuclear power plants licensed in the US. We have an abundance of fuel to run them.In the power trade you would normally use the fuel that is least expensive and abundant in the area-(thats why coal is still popular-we have LOTS of it)The windmills are a good idea-but would have to be put in non-populated areas-they don't pose a hazard for people-some just complain about their noise and that they are not "attractive"-but if they lower the power bill-that may be another matter-folks then accept it.Some scientists were concerned that the windmill turbines could pose a hazard to migrating birds.You wouldn't be able to put them in the major migration "flyways"And another note on the nuclear plants-Years ago when I lived in the DC area-VEPCO wanted to install a nuke plant-protesters were against it-when they opened the plant and put it on line-the protests vanished when customers power bills went down!
On the weapons manufaturing-some of the companies are foreign owned-I think this could present a security issue!Olin Industries and Remington Arms are examples.The tank gun on the M1 Abrams tank is built by a German company-same with its ammo.I do have some concerns about our sopisticated weapons-they tend to hit what they are aimed at-the gunner sure has to be SURE of his target-The weapons still doesn't know the diffence between freind or foe-esp if the target isn't identified.The gunner just has to be sure its an ENEMY target he is aiming at.

 

[Designgeek]

I did some design work on a utility-scale wind installation, and we were in pretty close contact with the bird data. Turns out the hazard is near zero with modern turbines.

The old ones got a bad rap because they used lattice towers (inviting place to perch) and high-speed rotors (invisible while spinning). The crude joke about those old machines is, you could open up a Seagull McNugget stand nearby and serve 'em fresh every day.

But the new ones are on smooth cylindrical towers (no place to perch) and turn at 15 - 20 RPM, so the blades are visible to birds. Birds avoid the blades just as they avoid tree branches waving in the breeze, and similar objects.

As far as "appearance" is concerned, I never understood that one. Industrial stuff is cool. Wind towers are cooler because they're huge 300' high is typical of the larger ones. And noise isn't a factor, you can barely hear 'em when standing underneath. People should have more appreciation for the infrastructure that makes their lives comfortable. I think of that when I drive by the oil refineries in Richmond, and the tank farms on the hillsides. Especially at night, they look like something out of science fiction, with lights twinkling amidst the towers and tanks and networks of pipes and so on. I would have no problem living near one of those, or a nuclear or wind installation.

The only real problem with wind is intermittency, even if you're in a class-5 wind area. For that reason, wind can be about 20% of the grid in most places, because other generating resources have to be able to respond to increase or decrease production as the inverse of what the wind generators are putting out. If you have hydro nearby, all the better, because the reservoir acts like a battery, and can respond quickly to changes in wind output and power demand.

It's going to take a lot of wind and a lot of uranium to make the future hum, particularly as oil starts to peak out in a few years. Fortunately the US has good uranium resources, as does Australia, and we don't have to worry about terrorist nutcases taking over in Australia.

When you hear abou the "hydrogen economy," what's implicit is that it will require major nuclear and wind development. Hydrogen is not an energy source, it's simply a transport medium, i.e. a carrier of embodied energy. The energy to produce the hydrogen has to come from somewhere, i.e. wind & uranium. You can take the entire output of a windfarm or a reactor, and put it into producing hydrogen: this lets you site the turbines & reactors in places where the grid is either insuffiicient or is already well-supplied with electricity. So it adds up to a greater degree of freedom of location when choosing places to build the generating facilities.

 

[bwoods]

GE

What was stated above is what I have also found from my researach on GE. They have committed support to currently operating Nuclear plants. However,ome new GE plants, from I hear, will be built in Japan using GE's new Advanced Boiling Water Reactor System. They are actively marketing this design in Europe and Asian markets. GE does the design but not the manufacturing. It's a great system..core meltdowns are virtually impossible due to new high temperature ceramic materials and a natural flow emergency core cooling system which will work automatically under no human supervision and no power (e.g. no pumps required). It's a unique system that relies only on natural convection to keep the core cool. The ceramic fuel rods have a higher melting point than the temperatures produced during the fission process. The engineers call it "walk-away" safe. If you have a reactor trip and loose all power to the back up systems you can go home and have lunch and talk about how to fix it. No worries about a melt down or vessel breach. Unfortunately there is still remains somewhat of a anti-nuclear mind set in the U.S. It's not as prevalent as it may appear, it's just that the antinuclear population is so very vocal.

I've noticed my students at the university are very neutral to nuclear power and seem very responsive and postive to my lectures on it. This gives me hope that one day attitudes may change. GE's purchasing of the wind power business was a step in the right direction. But wind power can never be used universally, like nuclear. Yo need near steady winds and it's very land intensive. As mentioned above, it is a great supplemental source of power that can augment other base electrical sources.

BTW, Welch does not have a speech impediment, at least not a physical one (I wouldn't make fun of this for anyone). It's more of a psychological thing with him. When he gets mad at his underlings, he looses control, gets red in the face and screams (literally) he gets to the point where he is so mad he can't speak and his words come out in stutters. It's at this point you know "Neutron Jack" will strike and you'd better be finding new employment.

Anyway, back to appliances. Should GE stay in the appliance industry, I think we will see more outsourcing and purchasing of products from other companies to help ease them out of the actual Manufacturing end. They have closed down many building at their Louisville planat and have only a fraction of the employees they did during their peak in the 1970's. They stopped production of disposals and compactors several years ago. They contract Whirlpool to make their compactors and Annaheim Manufacturing (Sinkmaster) produces their disposal line. Their refrigerator compressors were being imported from Japan, the last I heard,since Welch botched up their new rotary compressor by introducing it before long term relaibility studies had been completed.

 

[tolivac]

I am glad GE is still in the nuclear power business-their new reacter design has and shows promise for the industry.May it will be reaccepted .We still need it as a "prime mover"I think the wind power is great to supplement and serve as "load Management' power sources to conventional power.Sounds like the problems with the wind turbines have been solved.What are the towers and propeller blades made from?-and do their generators produce DC power to be stored in batteries and sent to inverters-then to the power grid?I would think their inconsistent speed would pose frequency regulation problems.On GE appliances-sounds like its just a "name" now-they outsource so much of their appliance building to others now.

 

[gelaundry4ever]

GE garbage

GE started making garbage washers and dryers since 1995. They're getting worse by the minute!

 

[vacerator]

GE stock is in the crapper

They sold the white goods division to Haier to concentrate on their core businesses.
The shareholders voted to approve the sale.
$2 billion was a lot of revenue. Where did it go? Now they have no revenue from white goods either.
I saw a theater commercial about their portable power plants for Indonesia, etc.
They're in wind power also, and solar. Geo thermal?
Whats the problem then?

 

[vacerator]

Oh, and also

have a substantial tax cut coming.

 

[Chetlaham]

Least repaired

They aren't lying. They just aren't. Rather marketing is playing on consumer myths and per-conceived motions. When these washer do fail, often consumers are advised to just chuck them. Both from the repair cost (these washers are hard to service), the parts cost (its often the most expensive part the blows like the transmission) and the fact the washer will have more problems soon after (due to all around planned obsolescence) that its much smarter to just get a new washers especially when that washer is something like a Whirlpool or Speed Queen. This is exactly why I never take any advertising seriously. They can be telling the truth without actually telling the truth.

 

[Chetlaham]

GE stock

GE is trying to be Microsoft, Apple, Google, ect. Or at least the manufacturing, Gov, Military, corporate, data, robotics, ect version of them. And to be honest I don't see that working out for them. Consumer goods are a much less risking endeavor especially when you perfected them for some time.

 

[vacerator]

Yes, and we'll see

if the share price recovers after large investors buy them up cheaper now than they were when healthier. I think it's intentionally manipulated so they can do so.
Are you that trusting?