zlacker

>>gwintr+(OP)
Something nobody is saying is that there genuinely are synergies in GE's businesses. Take MRI for an example (albeit one I know a lot about...):

-- the superconducting magnet shell requires the accurate creation of 'nested doll' cryogenic containers, built to withstand magnetostatic forces in a highly regulated environment with defined safety requirements under catastrophic failure modes. Solving the design problem is equivalent to solving a huge set of nasty, coupled PDEs subject to loads of material constraints. This is directly analogous to aspects of jet engine design.

-- inside the bore of the magnet (but not in the cryostat) goes a device called the gradient set, whose job is to generate \partial B_z/ \partial_{xyz} as a function of time (that, very much indirectly, the radiographer specifies). This is a water cooled, resistive set of magnet coils with a defined frequency response curve, linearity requirements, etc. The current into them is generated by a set of three huge amplifiers, which have to actually take a signal delivered on a timebase of microseconds and volts and amplify it with negligible delay and deliver kA into a large inductor centimetres away from a patient. This is a formidable (power) electronic engineering challenge with huge parallels to various aspects of electrical engineering – e.g. managing (preventing) dielectric breakdown, thermal management, inverse solutions to Maxwell's equations in a quasistatic region (people use streamfunctions to do this well), etc.

-- the RF side of the system has to transmit kV and receive microvolts within microseconds into a definitively challenging electrodynamic environment with constraints on harmonics. Everything has to keep to a hard realtime constraint. The ADC must have a huge dynamic range and the problem is conducted massively in parallel. This is directly analogous to problems in telecommunications or RF design, but harder -- intermittent pulsed not continuous wave, and a hard requirement to accurately measure analogue voltages. Designing the RF coil ("probe" in NMR speak or ≈"antenna") is a further horrible (full-wave) EM design problem that even GE often subcontract out to one of about five specialist firms worldwide.

It's not a priori obvious to me that lots of competing companies would be better at creating stuff that requires the interaction of disciplines like this. Rather, I view the split up of GE and all of the woes of the article as evidence of a business mismanaged by MBAs. The defined benefit pensions should have been protected by law and overseen by an independent regulator - like my defined benefit pension that sits above my employer and shares risk among many different universities.

>>azalem+kC
In the '00s triggered by a stock market tumble, GE declared MRI was mature technology, put its MR products into maintenance mode, gutted R&D, laid off their coil lab (which other manufacturers used to contract with), canceled all new product development, sent platform software to India, and got rid of the US development team. After the breakup, GE's been trying really hard to catch up (which is good!). They're leading on the new deep-learning recons due to ties with SV but all their kit is dated and old and built for a different era. Even now it's still just new lipstick on the old tech because it takes so long to get stuff out. The new software platform that doesn't suck has been in an eternal state of "real soon now". Having said that... my sense is that they seem genuinely hungry while their major competitor has become a bit too well-fed in GE's absence. I do really like the things GE has coming, they're... just not here yet.

>>fluidc+q41
I agree with you on all of this (and like the fact that GE uses linux as a base, and not, as Siemens and Philips do, Windows + cygwin + a separate box either running linux or vxWorks). I guess my point was I think it's interesting that GE's main competitors in the MRI space are...well, Siemens and Philips, both of whom independently have their historical origins in power engineering (and make gas turbines!). Both have been going for a long, long time from the early days of MRI. And if you look at CT as another example – well, that came out of BASF, another engineering conglomerate. Ultrasound, first proposed for medical use by the physicist Paul Langevin, found practical application much later, again under similar conditions.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: it's almost as if the combination of supporting physics and engineering without particular attention to the ultimate "core competency" or "end market segment" lets creative, interdisciplinary ideas like this flourish.