[Elecraft] Big Rigs?

[David Woolley]

N2EY at aol.com wrote:
> 
> If you mean the company, there are all sorts of problems associated with 
> too-fast growth. Many good companies have been damaged or even destroyed by trying 

There are also problems associated with growth at any rate. The biggest 
of these is that it generally forces you either to become a B2B 
(business to business) company or a mass market company, neither of 
which are compatible with supporting niche consumer products.  It also 
tends to result in extreme industrialisation of the support process, 
i.e. the use of low skilled staff working from scripts.

> 
> There's also the fact that the existing Elecraft product line isn't going 
> away, and needs to be supported all through this time. 

However, if the company becomes too big, the venture capitalists' 
management consultants will almost certainly insist that support for it 
is dropped, as it is incompatible with the high volume, mass market 
organisation that you need to be big.  (That will also happen if the 
company gets taken over.)

Although the analogy isn't perfect, consider Apple, which was built on 
the basis of Steve Wozniak's ability to play tricks with minimal 
hardware, but he dropped out in favour of Steve Jobs when it got big, 
and what one now has is essentially a fashion, rather than engineering, 
based company.

Big companies can't compete with Elecraft because they are big companies!

-- 
David Woolley
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