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Old 11th May 2020, 8:02 pm   #41
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

I believe that Xerox invented "Windows", but saw no future in it, Accordingly they disposed of their patents, one of which included video conferencing.

The point that a business only exists to make money for its shareholders was the topic of a straight-talking presentation given to new entrants when I joined Plessey. I think of it when reading the sort of nebulous mission statements that have become fashionable in industry (and government) in recent years.

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Old 11th May 2020, 11:21 pm   #42
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

When my Dad worked for IBM they badly misread some ways how the computer industry was evolving, luckily they had enough areas of business making a profit to keep going.

One bad move was paying Microsoft to come up with an alternative to Windows that almost no-one else used.
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Old 12th May 2020, 9:55 pm   #43
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Where Kodak really tripped up is with digital - one of their young undergraduates built the first prototype digital camera in the mid seventies and showed it to the management, who promptly told him to go away, hide it and busy himself with something else!
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Old 12th May 2020, 10:03 pm   #44
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

They hammered home that early beginning by developing a range of (then) very high performance digital cameras built into and around Nikon professional bodies and just about everyone is still using their DSC series image numbering scheme.

Then they blew it.

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Old 12th May 2020, 10:22 pm   #45
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

A bunch of us, when we worked for Generics, went to Kodak Stuttgart to make a proposal for a projection system based on an LCD light valve. In 1986.

At that stage they had the global stranglehold on carousel projectors that used photographic slides.

They just were not interested. Saw no point in the technology, there would be problems with the heat from the lamp, they were fulfilling the marked need with their existing technology. The usual usual.

Like my visit to Olivetti in Milan around the same time to propose developing an electronic book for them. This was going to use an LCD display and store data on a mini CD with libraries of books. They were so unimpressed that this technology had legs "where's the prototype?" that they did not even offer me a coffee. They could have been decades ahead of the Kindle if only they'd have had a modicum of vision.

Hey ho.

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Old 12th May 2020, 11:23 pm   #46
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

I remember there was a feature about technology being dismissed but ended up doing well.

One was the Kindle, & another was the Iphone, which Alan Sugar thought Apple was crazy for launching in an already competitive mobile phone market.

Even Nokia eventually slipped up by dismissing Android as a "short term fix" and trying their own operating system that no-one else really bothered with.

There was a very good Finnish documentary about the rise & fall of Nokia, which has been shown on BBC4.
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Old 13th May 2020, 1:25 am   #47
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

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A bunch of us, when we worked for Generics, went to Kodak Stuttgart to make a proposal for a projection system based on an LCD light valve. In 1986....They just were not interested. Saw no point in the technology, there would be problems with the heat from the lamp, they were fulfilling the marked need with their existing technology. The usual usual.

Like my visit to Olivetti in Milan around the same time to propose developing an electronic book for them. This was going to use an LCD display and store data on a mini CD with libraries of books. They were so unimpressed that this technology had legs "where's the prototype?" that they did not even offer me a coffee. They could have been decades ahead of the Kindle if only they'd have had a modicum of vision.
Fascinating stuff. That said, to play devil's advocate, how often in consumer electronics have we seen products come to market that flopped? Just because something can be done is not the same as it needing to be done. Often, there are 'solutions looking for a problem'. A lot of it is successfully persuading consumers that it's worth the outlay.

I did some work in a high end audio equipment place back in the early 90s. The in -store displays were something to behold. MiniDisc and DCC had just come out, with DAT only a few years old. Pioneer had been trying to reinvent Laser Discs around this time. There were CD-V games consoles/players. None of those formats (some of which to be fair found longer-term niche markets) came anywhere close to the audio and VHS tapes that then were selling millions. Another type of tape or CD just wasn't seen as necessary by the masses.

Timing is also vital. There's little point rushing things out until the situation is conducive to success. In the 80s, someone designed a proto-mp3 player. Music on a chip. But without the internet to download audio onto it, and without a high spec computer to digitize your LPs, who the hell would use it? It would have died a death in 1985. Launch that a decade or so later and you'd then have wiped the floor with the discman.

As to name changes - BASF was synonymous with tape for decades. Renaming it EMTEC (I think it was due to acquisiton by Imation) was probably the worst decision ever made, that brand sunk without trace.
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Old 13th May 2020, 8:58 am   #48
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

The main thing is that corporate death is driven by not having the mindset of investing in new technologies. On the other hand the non-myopic company invests in what-ifs. Sure, some product technologies may be still-born, or before their time, but valuing technology drive fosters a culture of innovation (and patents) which is critical to longevity.

IBM get this entirely. They now have 19 research facilities spread across 12 laboratories on six continents. They patent aggressively too. I was on the receiving end of this when we acquired an STM (scanning tunneling microscope) company. We got a very polite letter from IBM saying that they suggested our product was covered by this list of their patents, they invited us to look at them, and if we agreed they would charge a royalty of 2%. Nothing punitive - they wanted licensees to survive and continue to pay a modest royalty going forward.

In the early days of IBM research, Thomas Watson (Jr) used to walk though the labs, ask what people were working on, and roundly criticize them if they were working on something that was too applied.

The companies that have problems are those who keep making the same products, and incrementally improving them, and that is good enough. Product myopia. Then a disruptive technology is developed by another company and all of a sudden a sure fire cash cow technology vanishes in a very short time.

Not long before the Kodak and Olivetti meetings, there was a massive investment by a consortium of city investors in improving daisywheel printers - 6 months before the introduction of the laser printer. Incremental improvement vs disruptive technology.

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Old 13th May 2020, 10:52 am   #49
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

There was a time in the early - mid 1990s when a few software companies released reference resources of CD-Rom, one being Microsoft Encarta.

I presume they thought they would be popular with schools and educationally minded parents, & updated editions could easily be released.

In the end it seems there weren't many repeat sales, and as the internet became more popular people started to use the Wikipedia & other online resources that are regularly updated.

Some of these were designed to use the short lived CD-I format, which I remember my school having, but never seemed to catch on as PCs became more affordable as a home computer.
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Old 13th May 2020, 8:11 pm   #50
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Quote:
Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers View Post
The main thing is that corporate death is driven by not having the mindset of investing in new technologies. On the other hand the non-myopic company invests in what-ifs. Sure, some product technologies may be still-born, or before their time, but valuing technology drive fosters a culture of innovation (and patents) which is critical to longevity.

IBM get this entirely.
Yes!

In the 50s 60s and 70s the IBM mentality was "sell the customer a milliom-dollar mainframe and thousands of dumb terminals to access it".

That went a bit wobbly in the 80s with the emergence of client/server technology and the PC [the first IBM-PC was designed to serve as a semi-automated console to a mainframe!"] but they pivoted and realised that the hardware was becoming cheap and the real value was in understanding - and selling software - to support the business processes. If this incidentally involved selling a pile of servers/storage to run the software on, so be it - but that wasn't the big profit-centre.

In the same timeframe, |D|I|G|I|T|A|L| - who had ruled the roost with their VAX mini/midicomputers failed to see the change. |D|I|G|I|T|A|L| failed and the remains were bought-out by Compaq, who in turn failed and were subsumed by HP.

Not long after, Sun Microsystems - who had once been the go-to company for high-end scientific/financial-business workstations and back-end servers - were bought out by Oracle (a software company).

It's amusing to think of the "niche" computer-companies I worked with in the 1990s.

Masspar
Alliant
Sequent
Elxsi
Pyramid
Encore
Convex
Intergraph
Silicon Graphics.

All now just silicon-dust blowing in the sand.

The world moves on.
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Old 13th May 2020, 11:29 pm   #51
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Quote:
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers View Post
The main thing is that corporate death is driven by not having the mindset of investing in new technologies. On the other hand the non-myopic company invests in what-ifs. Sure, some product technologies may be still-born, or before their time, but valuing technology drive fosters a culture of innovation (and patents) which is critical to longevity.

IBM get this entirely.
Yes!

In the 50s 60s and 70s the IBM mentality was "sell the customer a milliom-dollar mainframe and thousands of dumb terminals to access it".

That went a bit wobbly in the 80s with the emergence of client/server technology and the PC [the first IBM-PC was designed to serve as a semi-automated console to a mainframe!"] but they pivoted and realised that the hardware was becoming cheap and the real value was in understanding - and selling software - to support the business processes. If this incidentally involved selling a pile of servers/storage to run the software on, so be it - but that wasn't the big profit-centre.

In the same timeframe, |D|I|G|I|T|A|L| - who had ruled the roost with their VAX mini/midicomputers failed to see the change. |D|I|G|I|T|A|L| failed and the remains were bought-out by Compaq, who in turn failed and were subsumed by HP.

Not long after, Sun Microsystems - who had once been the go-to company for high-end scientific/financial-business workstations and back-end servers - were bought out by Oracle (a software company).

It's amusing to think of the "niche" computer-companies I worked with in the 1990s.

Masspar
Alliant
Sequent
Elxsi
Pyramid
Encore
Convex
Intergraph
Silicon Graphics.

All now just silicon-dust blowing in the sand.

The world moves on.
My Dad remembers when there were a lot of computer companies who specialised in just one area of computing. When companies needed to become a jack of all trades they lost out, especially as some of them had been selling a lot of hardware without making a lot of profit. When the new customers started drying up some of the companies quickly folded up unless they could become more versatile.
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Old 13th May 2020, 11:45 pm   #52
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

There are numerous examples of one technology replacing another. Sometimes the change is seismic. We've already mentioned companies like Kodak and Polaroid, whose film business was almost wiped out by digital cameras in a fairly short period of time. When a sea change happens like that, it's always going to be difficult for a large, long-established business to adapt quickly.

But Ever Ready should have been able to adapt. After all, demand for batteries hasn't gone away, far from it. Like some others, I can remember buying Ever Ready batteries from a local shop, stocked up once a week by the Ever Ready delivery van. If you wanted a battery that was not in stock, you could ask the shopkeeper who would get you one when the van came round again. When you next visited the shop, "Here's your battery, Sir!". Truly personal service.

Of course, people's shopping patterns changed from local corner shops to large, out-of-town superstores which carried large stocks of items at low prices. Longer-lasting Alkaline batteries became much more popular with the arrival of power-hungry electronic toys and gadgets. But the change was gradual - indeed, corner shops and zinc-carbon batteries are still around today. I'm sure Ever Ready could have survived - they had plenty of time to adapt, but it seemed like they didn''t want to.

Personally, I would put a lot of the blame on Hanson, who took over the company when it was still profitable and had a high market share. Hanson milked the profits until they started to dry up, without re-investing much into the business.
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Old 14th May 2020, 12:09 am   #53
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

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Some of these were designed to use the short lived CD-I format
So short lived that I was tasked to make an I/R receiver to allow a CDI remote - which had a joystick on it - to function as a wireless serial mouse which could be used to control a PC used for lectures, etc - long before there actually were such things as wireless mice / wireless touchpads.

In other words, by that point in time the main unit was considered to be useless, and the remote was looking for a more useful job to do.
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Old 14th May 2020, 12:23 am   #54
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

A month or so back I got a thick envelope from stockbrokers acting on HP's behalf exhorting me to vote my shares against a hostile takeover bid from Xerox' holding company.

So predation is still loose on the planet.

There's no one left in HP that I know, but I still feel some attachment to the name for old time's sake, maybe the memory of the Bill and Dave years.

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Old 14th May 2020, 8:33 am   #55
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

The core problem is often a 'cosy' board. People who understand the current business they are in, perhaps live locally, on good remuneration packages and retirement is not far away. Why would they want to rock the boat, or reduce the bottom line by making bold decisions to develop and move into other, lucrative, emerging markets? So, they stay as they are, rumbling along making reasonable profits until inevitably the company nose dives. Ironically, they are then often seen as victims of "cheap foreign imports" and similar 'unfair' businesses by their loyal workforces. There's a view that that situation is often a problem of ageing, blinkered boards. I'm sure it's not always the case.
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Old 14th May 2020, 9:03 am   #56
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Indeed, the demand for batteries has never gone down and is now ramping rapidly.

A simple test question:

If Ever Ready had been on the ball, would it be Tesla that is currently leading the pack making cells for vehicles, domestic energy stores and that facility in Australia?

Jimmy Hanson may have eked out every penny he could from the business he bought, but he really missed the big opportunity, didn't he? And the rot had set in at Ever Ready long before he got his hands on it. If it had been going well, it wouldn't have fallen into his sights.

Ever Ready had the momentum, the size and the distribution networks to have given Mallory a clobbering, but they were too cumbersome to notice the world was changing.

A good business should have spotters out looking for the inevitable, so they can prepare, and make the most of it.

David
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Old 14th May 2020, 11:48 am   #57
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

David and Steve make good points. By the time of getting to early 60's, the energy and enthusiasm of directors is likely to be diminishing. They've still got loads to offer, but younger blood is needed.

And yes - demand for batteries still exists, more than ever! As per the OP's article, if E-R had embraced alkaline, and kept up with the shopping patterns, then the ending would have been very different.

But - what killed off their radio division?
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Old 14th May 2020, 12:14 pm   #58
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

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But - what killed off their radio division?
Video killed it
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Old 14th May 2020, 3:01 pm   #59
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Oh buggle!
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Old 14th May 2020, 4:27 pm   #60
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

I always understood that they went into radio just to further their battery sales, as did Vidor.
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