‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

[kalee20]

Maybe. But they also made mains sets, which definitely wouldn't boost battery sales!

I have one of these, quite posh, with the Ever Ready logo on the back!

[G6Tanuki]

Ever Ready was only ever a big player in the UK (which was a relatively small market) - for them to have become a world-leader would have required some serious investment, with no guarantee of a sensible return on that investment.

The intertwining history of British Ever-Ready/BEREC and the US Eveready company are interesting.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eveready_Battery_Company

Sometimes it really does make all-round economic sense to disassemble a failing company: recover what value remains in its brands and sell the old office/factory-sites off for shopping-malls/housing.

[stevehertz]

Originally Posted by kalee20

Maybe. But they also made mains sets, which definitely wouldn't boost battery sales!

I have one of these, quite posh, with the Ever Ready logo on the back!

Until I saw it, I would never have believed that ER made big, bold, beautiful sets like that. I'm more accustomed to them making rather dowdy cloth covered battery sets. You live and learn.

[AC/HL]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

Ever Ready was only ever a big player in the UK (which was a relatively small market)

This was the problem with much of the consumer electronics industry, probably others too but we're not concerned with them here.

We just couldn't get the economy of scale. Some niches like HiFi did well for a while but most were simply overwhelmed in the mass markets. Globalisation put the hat on it.

[duncanlowe]

Remember, sometimes economy of scale isn't what it seems. There are UK industries, trading very much on their small volume, niche, British identity (which they have through what they do) that are very much parts of multinationals and rely on their core Engineering by being part of that multinational company.

[greg_simons]

Originally Posted by emeritus

I do wonder if some companies get consultants in under the mistaken belief that consultants are more knowledgable than themselves. My experiences of big-name consultants' involvements with organisations I have worked for has left me with a rather jaundiced view of their competences, but perhaps I have been unfortunate. It is a rare consultant who will report that things are just fine as they are, and on some occasions I have had the impression that the point of the exercise had been to jusitify what the directors wanted to do rather than to make an objective assessment of the situation. 'Nuff said.

Agree wholeheartedly, I think industry employs consultants not to bring new ideas to a company but to do the unspoken will of the board, thereby acting as a firewall between disgruntled employees and management, need to lose a quarter of the workforce?, get a consultant to do the dirty for you, save your own hands from getting dirty.
Greg.

[Radio Wrangler]

Consultants are normally brought in on a contract, and that means what they are to do has to be clearly defined. Permanent employees, by a process of subtraction, get all the ill-defined or unpredictable work to do.

So it's easier for the consultant to look better than the locals, and it's easy for management to take a poor view of their permanent staff. This reinforces their decision to get a consultant in. Of course, if they go 100% down this road and everybody becomes a consultant with a contractually defined task, then the wheels fall off

David

[duncanlowe]

I found some originals in a battery powered slide viewer my parents had. Batteries pretty dead but no leaks:

[knobtwiddler]

Originally Posted by Hartley118

I used to know the famous Signetics NE5534 audio chip as the Philips TDA1034 when we first introduced it into studio mixing desks in 1976.

Martin

And 44 years down the line, you might be interested to know that even in 2020, the 5534 remains the quietest IC bar-none when used as a MM phono input (which disappeared from many amplifiers in the 90s, when every man and his dog claimed vinyl to be on its last legs... in turn, creating a competitive niche for small OEMs to market standalone phono preamps). You can chisel the best part of a dB off the noise floor if you roll your own gain block discretely, but in this application, the 5534 is still the quietest monolithic option.

Some of you might have noticed the Signetics legend, that their 5532 outperforms the later TI parts. A few years back, when I finally saved up enough to get my first Rohde+Schwarz analyser, I was determined to compare the 2 parts and see if this was simply mythology or objective fact. I was rather surprised to see that the Signetics part edges the TI... So, onepresumes, the legend originated from someone with test equipment rather than 'golden ears'... It was a few years back, but I seem to recall the overall THD to be lower.

[Kyle__B]

Originally Posted by Richard_FM

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.

They never had a chance because they made the critical mistake of thinking that they were selling computers to people. No company has ever sold computers to people, they've sold a solution to a problem, and the solution has by coincidence been a computer.

Those specialist companies made some very interesting machines. They could do anything yet thought of, and they did them in novel ways. If you had a problem like needing to do three dimensional computer aided design, run a magazine's colour printing press at dozens of pages a second coming off hard disk storage etc... SGI would sell you a beautiful, incredible looking computer as luxurious and exotic as any italian sports car you care to name. Something that should truly get it's own room at the louvre. And it would cost anywhere between ten thousand and a quarter of a million dollars!

SGI, SUN and the others of these type didn't realise that businesses weren't buying these expensive computers because they desired the most perfect computer yet made, but that they were buying them out of absolute necessity, and they spent their working life hidden away in dimly lit ugly rooms or cupboards running exactly one program. They spent small fortunes writing all kinds of relatively mundane programs like databases, word processors etc, promoting the idea that you could kit out your whole office with them. The standard response from their perspective customer was "Why would I buy a $20,000 computer the size of a washing machine for my receptionist?"

By the time they started to realize this, it was already too late to do anything about it. The businesses they were selling to already had normal cheap PCs for everything else, and saw no need to change. SGI tried to cut down their posh machines into a cheap model but it was still four grand, and what office manager would spend four grand per worker, plus all new software, plus cost of retraining everybody, when all they need is spreadsheets and emails?

At that point the fate is sealed. There's nothing SGI or Sun could do, no move to make. All they could do is wait and watch as every year ordinary PCs got faster and more capable. The moment that an ordinary cheap Dell could now do a specialist job, they were doomed.

[Radio Wrangler]

I saw precisely that change happen from within HP.

That company had several computational product lines when I joined in the early 70's:

Pocket calculators
Programmable desk top calculators (inc little printer and mag card reader/writer)
Minicomputer (technical oriented)
Minicomputer (business oriented)

The pocket calculators became programmable
The desktop calculators grew in capability and merged with the technical minicomputers
The business minicomputers grew and took over from the IBM mainframe we ran the division on. And a line of PCs started up.

The PCs looked silly at first. What were we doing making IBM PC clones? OK there were claims of improvements, but everybody making PC clones made those claims. The PCs worked their way down the tree, eventually each junior manager getting his own. They did word processing, spreadsheets, overhead projector slides.

Engineering was done on the workstations that grew out of the desktops and minicomputers. RISC processors were developed to very high performance.

People started buying PCs for home use. The price was expensive, but the performance was rapidly growing for no extra cost.

There was a crucial point where some outside companies started writing engineering software for PCs. Fairly crude printed circuit layout, circuit analysis, RF analysis. Those engineers lucky enough to get their own workstations sneered. Those engineers on the hand-me-down chain of workstations began to get envious of the PCs. The quality of the graphics coming out of the project managers got better.

The key was software availability. Soon the PC user could do the things the workstation user could. Slower, but at a small fraction of the price. One per engineer happened. The Unix workstation was doomed it appeared.

The fancy workstation machines evolved into servers and the PCs took over everything else.

PCs were now powerful enough for all the high-falutin engineering software to get ported onto them.

So that's what you have still. PCs of various power/price points and servers.

During the big growth surge, computer stuff went from a small sideline of an instrument-making company, to being seven times bigger than the instrument product lines (and they had been growing too over the period) Eventually the computer side controlled the company and saw that the instrument side looked old-fashioned and they thought it was holding back the image they wanted to project as a thrusting, forward-looking corporation.

So they split the firm and floated off the non-computer stuff as an independent firm on the NYSE. Biggest split-out in history at that point.

One small sour note in all the gung-ho-ishness was an article, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, pointing out that while the computer firm had the big turnover, the instrument firm had the big profit percentages and might be the better investment....

David

[Kyle__B]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

One small sour note in all the gung-ho-ishness was an article, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, pointing out that while the computer firm had the big turnover, the instrument firm had the big profit percentages and might be the better investment....

David

Felt that through pure personal experience. Profit margins on PCs in the 90s was that you could build something equivalent to a name-brand for a third of the price. Was a good back bedroom business.

Nowadays selling a PC to someone is a good way of spending £299 to receive back £300 and then end up on the hook for technical support for two years.

[stevehertz]

I remember in the 60s we used to put our flagging transistor radio and toy batteries in the warm oven by the side of the fireplace supposedly to 're-energise' them! Was there anything behind that belief?

[Jonster]

The functioning of a battery is just a chemical reaction, which speeds up when heated. So you can get a final boost from a flagging battery by warming it up.

[Radio Wrangler]

Warming up speeds depolarisation in trad dry cells and does lead to partial battery recovery.

David

[electronicskip]

Originally Posted by stevehertz

I remember in the 60s we used to put our flagging transistor radio and toy batteries in the warm oven by the side of the fireplace supposedly to 're-energise' them! Was there anything behind that belief?

When i was a kid i used to line mine up on the radiator to re energise them, and it did work in a short term as i recall.

[kalee20]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

I saw precisely that change happen from within HP.
...
During the big growth surge, computer stuff went from a small sideline of an instrument-making company, to being seven times bigger than the instrument product lines (and they had been growing too over the period) Eventually the computer side controlled the company and saw that the instrument side looked old-fashioned and they thought it was holding back the image they wanted to project as a thrusting, forward-looking corporation.
...
So they split the firm and floated off the non-computer stuff as an independent firm on the NYSE.

There is some logic. But what would have been nice to think, is that the two divisions were split: the computer side being branded HP (thus maintaining identity with the computer-buying masses) and the instrument side, Hewlett-Packard.

I don't like the name Agilent.

[Radio Wrangler]

I went to work one day, and I was working for Hewlett Packard. The next day I went to the same place and continued with what I'd been doing and the name on the firm was now Agilent. It seemed nothing had changed. We deeply regretted the loss of the name, after all the firm started and had the longest history in the instruments. Also the computers were very much 'me too' things, the instruments were game changers.

What we discovered later was a lot nastier.

Quite a few of us had stock options, granted as a thank-you for pulling off special jobs. Stock options are contracts. It granted me the opportunity to buy up to XXXX shares at a frozen price which would be held for ten years. So if the company share price went up and I thought it might be the peak of the ten year period, I could buy some shares at less than their market value, then sell them at a profit, or sit on them I I thought they'd go higher still beyond the 10 year period. An incentive scheme that ties people who have a proven strong influence on a company, and an incentive for them to stay. Part of the contract says that if you retire, you still get three years for the options to be available. If you leave other than through retirement then they void instantly.

So we were all no longer working for HP, and it wasn't retirement. Under the terms of the options, every single one had just gone void. The options weren't worth a great deal at that point, but if the previous ten years was a guide, they'd have made a bit over 100k dollars. Quite a nice thank you. But gone.

As incentive schemes go, it was a smack in the face delivered to precisely the strongest contributors to the firms success. Bit of an whoopsie. And also it removed the incentive for them to stay, just at a point when the company was fragile and trying to rebuild its reputation with customers wondering who this Agilent were.

As with a lot of these things, the devil is in the details. With the way the industry went in the following years, those options would not have done a lot, but we didn't know that then. Other people lost a lot more than I did.

When companies and their names get traded around like pawns on a chessboard, people can get hurt.

None of our people got hurt anything like the communities around the Ever Ready factory. That wasn't a matter of a cancelled perk, that was dumping people on the dole.

David

[Top Cap]

Been there, done it :-(
My company changed name through acquisition and the shares we held became worthless.
As for HP, we had the utmost respect for their test equipment but it seemed to get diluted when the name was changed to Agilent, or as one of my colleagues said, "It's an anagram! it means Genital"
Hardest time in my career was the cancellation of the AEW Nimrod putting thousands out of work. It was cancelled on the very day that the most successful flight trial had ended, seeing targets much further than the AWAC's flying with it.
Developed at a time when TTL ruled the roost, we always said the hardware would get smaller and indeed, with the forlorn hope the Chinese would buy it, work continued with it for a while reducing complete cabinets of electronics to a single PCB.

[Cobaltblue]

Several years after Plessey Controls became part of Siemens they decided to try to "align" the employee structures to other Siemens businesses.

This wasn't a malign act by Siemens just a need for a comparable structure.

The problem was that the HR department (Anti personnel department) didn't really understand the Plessey structures or the reasons some of the anomalies existed in the first place.

The promise was no one would be disadvantaged financially or otherwise, unfortunately a promise that was not kept (and indeed was impossible to keep, funny how we worked that out on day 1).

The very rigid structures within Siemens which are great for comparison of diverse roles across within the business and across the globe were a poor fit to the looser Plessey structures and special cases.

Like many I was hit on both accounts money and position, it was almost worth it to see those that made the promises squirm (Said Anti Personnel Department) as the true depth of their lack of knowledge became clear. They were all new the old Plessey HR staff had been moved on.

Some financials were partially restored but the lack of trust that a promise won't be kept 3 decades on still persists and will do so till all us old Plessey boys retire, not long now!

Cheers

Mike T