Aside from the fact that whatever Adafruit bought, it's almost certainly not Radioshack's whole former business with 2500 locations...
Radioshack failed by giving up its original niche and trying to do what bigger, better-funded competitors were doing, badly. Maybe there wasn't a sufficient market for an electronic components retail store, but there certainly wasn't a sufficient market for a mini Best Buy with even worse prices.
There might well be a market for a much smaller number of stores with stuff for people who make things. Germany's Conrad Electronics appears to do well with that, though their stores are larger and also include a lot of ordinary consumer stuff.
Radioshack failed when they fired their engineers that were really good at coming up with all the neat stuff they had at the time. So they had no engineers then they started to be a me-too in an already filled space of consumer electronics and cellphones.
I bet that if they would have found a way to hold on to the vision their original engineers had, they could have been the ones to create the Raspberry Pie at an earlier date. Or drones, or expand their part business and become what Digikey is now. Radio Shack had wildly more resources than any of these other projects when they started, but they scoffed at the kits and parts and left them for the cell phone market which they coveted for an easy dime that didn't require the engineers of old.
I'm surprised that they held on for as long as they did, all the while being completely blind to the "makers" that were still there and growing up around them. Until it was quite literally too late and they just became another "me-too" there also.
Comments
Aside from the fact that whatever Adafruit bought, it's almost certainly not Radioshack's whole former business with 2500 locations...
Radioshack failed by giving up its original niche and trying to do what bigger, better-funded competitors were doing, badly. Maybe there wasn't a sufficient market for an electronic components retail store, but there certainly wasn't a sufficient market for a mini Best Buy with even worse prices.
There might well be a market for a much smaller number of stores with stuff for people who make things. Germany's Conrad Electronics appears to do well with that, though their stores are larger and also include a lot of ordinary consumer stuff.
Radioshack failed when they fired their engineers that were really good at coming up with all the neat stuff they had at the time. So they had no engineers then they started to be a me-too in an already filled space of consumer electronics and cellphones.
I bet that if they would have found a way to hold on to the vision their original engineers had, they could have been the ones to create the Raspberry Pie at an earlier date. Or drones, or expand their part business and become what Digikey is now. Radio Shack had wildly more resources than any of these other projects when they started, but they scoffed at the kits and parts and left them for the cell phone market which they coveted for an easy dime that didn't require the engineers of old.
I'm surprised that they held on for as long as they did, all the while being completely blind to the "makers" that were still there and growing up around them. Until it was quite literally too late and they just became another "me-too" there also.
A handful of highly visible stores in large cities like NYC, London, Paris, and a few in CA might be profitable and generate free publicity