Posted on 01/07/2018 7:54:34 PM PST by Rabin
Brookfield Business Partners, together with institutional partners - collectively known as Brookfield - has agreed to acquire 100% of Westinghouse Electric Company from Toshiba Corporation for total of about $4.6 billion, the companies announced today.
(Excerpt) Read more at world-nuclear-news.org ...
Sad indeed, Rab.
WOW! I think we only paid around $200 for ours when I was a kid.
The great American company that built things is a thing of the past. Most household and brand names are kept but the product is usually Chinese.
It’s hard to say in today’s terms how much Westinghouse was worth.
You can say something like “12 Apples”.
I mean Westinghouse was BIG.
My first job 25 years ago might have been with Westinghouse but I went to RCA. I was pretty proud to have options to join two of the biggest and most storied engineering firms in the country. Now neither even exist in reality. Indeed I think most of the major engineering giants of the mid 20th century exist now only as a hollow brand name owned by someone else to make their crappy cheap products seem to have some gravitas. Someday this is probably the fate of companies like Apple and Microsoft. It’s how these things go.
I worked for Westinghouse for over 20 years. Far as I know, the nuke business was the last one that still called itself “Westinghouse”. Ol’ George deserves better.
One of the Pittsburgh papers ran a series of articles called “Who Killed Westinghouse?”. Was from the time when journalists actually researched their stories and wrote them to inform rather than to indoctrinate. It detailed each CEO from the 70’s on and how their poor decisions destroyed a great company.
Apple is still a good engineering company. Microsoft never was and never will be.
Why is this in sbr?
* U.S. Patent # 2,433,960, granted January 6, 1948
Buying out that poorly built Nuke plant in South Carolina from CB&I didn’t help matters either.
What is it culturally that Americans make the sh*^tist CEOs?
But they are dominant in their field. You couldn't find a person that hasn't heard of Microsoft and darned few who haven't used or owned their stuff. That's what I meant, not a comment on the quality of their products.
Too bad all the “Apple” phones, are made in CHINA.
Microsoft is a world class marketing company that sells software wich is slapped together ...
And don’t forget the legacy code, all the crap they leave in there because “you’ll never notice with the next generation PC”...
Better these Canadian guys than the CHiComs.
IIRC, the only new nuke power plants that we are building in the US, are Westinghouse models (new reactors at existing sites). The Chinese are building some too. Operations and maintenance will continue for decades on the installed base.
I may still have that article someplace. When the current Westinghouse co-execs. held up the finance arm as the epitome of success and challenged the other divisions to do as well they dropped the last straw on the camel. Unknown to them, the finance division was the lender of last resort for risky real estate developments that soon took the division down and Westinghouse started to crumble.
A major issue was that Westinghouse was a victim of the uranium cartel that mimicked the oil cartel actions of 73. Westinghouse would have escaped that except they had sold the uranium stock earlier. That left them exposed to the much higher prices required to meet the contract requirement to supplying fuel for the nuclear steam supply systems they sold. That brought the co-execs to power when, IIRC, Danforth decided to focus his attention on the uranium mess.
Along the way the co-execs. ended the requirement that each division must contribute to R%D at Churchill. That ended innovation.
There’s a lot of lessons to be learned from the destruction of Westinghouse.
My hobby is restoring “Old Arn” and these magnificent machines, with names such as Crescent, American Woodworking Machines, Delta, Craftsman, Atlas, etc. are evidence that once, there was a place called “America”, where people, called “Americans”, made wonderful creations.
Of course, that was before “political correctness” and hyphenated lineage.
In the 1980s Reagan adopted the IBM PC (open standard) running MS DOS (proprietary OS) as the standard desktop PC for the US gov. When the US gov says that all it's employees will have a IBM PC running MS DOS on their desktop it's kind of hard not to be dominate in your field.
No one will ever need more then 640K ram. Bill Gates.
So where does this put the construction project near Augusta? Will the new group continue?
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