We had some Brazillian electronics company also flopping last 10 years.
Reasons I indentified:
Losing creators and get swamped by middle-manager types... Too bad one of them don't even had a choice (the founder died, and this resulted into them switching from the most inventive electronic toys I ever saw, to low quality cheap DVD players, Karaoke machines and cheap Guitar Hero rippoffs using their Karaoke tech)
Second: Neglecting software... This one is obvious that when I applied to those companies as programmer, they wanted to pay me less than my rent was, absurdly ridiculous (and they all have a very high programmer turnover rate)
Third: Excessive outsourcing and subsequent problems in managing quality.
This was particularly striking with one company, that fixed the first two issues and licensed from China some products (developed in China, and not rip-offs) that would have high demand here.
Indeed, that plan ALMOST worked, their products sold so much they frequently had online store freezing by excessive visits, and their products were always out of stock...
But then reports showed up of exploding chargers, screens with lots of dead pixels, and so on... This went for about 6 months, with the demand still outstripping the negative reports, but eventually it became clear they could not find a outsourcer to do it properly, and they had divested themselves of their factories many years ago, and had no know how anymore in manufacturing, and did not even had sufficient knowledge to visit the outsourcers factory and force them to fix their process.
They are bankrupt know, to much unhappiness of the costumers attracted in their short lived renaissance.
Pardon the tangent, but did you ever write/blog about those "inventive electronic toys"? I am not speaking as a producer, but as a consumer and over-grown child. Were they like robotic/Legos/construction kits like they had back in the 80s/early-90s? Or something completely different?
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We had some Brazillian electronics company also flopping last 10 years.
Reasons I indentified: Losing creators and get swamped by middle-manager types... Too bad one of them don't even had a choice (the founder died, and this resulted into them switching from the most inventive electronic toys I ever saw, to low quality cheap DVD players, Karaoke machines and cheap Guitar Hero rippoffs using their Karaoke tech)
Second: Neglecting software... This one is obvious that when I applied to those companies as programmer, they wanted to pay me less than my rent was, absurdly ridiculous (and they all have a very high programmer turnover rate)
Third: Excessive outsourcing and subsequent problems in managing quality. This was particularly striking with one company, that fixed the first two issues and licensed from China some products (developed in China, and not rip-offs) that would have high demand here.
Indeed, that plan ALMOST worked, their products sold so much they frequently had online store freezing by excessive visits, and their products were always out of stock...
But then reports showed up of exploding chargers, screens with lots of dead pixels, and so on... This went for about 6 months, with the demand still outstripping the negative reports, but eventually it became clear they could not find a outsourcer to do it properly, and they had divested themselves of their factories many years ago, and had no know how anymore in manufacturing, and did not even had sufficient knowledge to visit the outsourcers factory and force them to fix their process.
They are bankrupt know, to much unhappiness of the costumers attracted in their short lived renaissance.
Pardon the tangent, but did you ever write/blog about those "inventive electronic toys"? I am not speaking as a producer, but as a consumer and over-grown child. Were they like robotic/Legos/construction kits like they had back in the 80s/early-90s? Or something completely different?