[sdiy] Those darned MBA chips!

[Harry Bissell Jr]

LOL...

the big issue is 'putting a price tag on goodwill'

Of course most of us would argue that goodwill is
worth
'something'... but how much ?  Your bean-counter WILL
listen to you if you can (somehow) quantitatively
show the benefit, from which he suntracts the cost...
if the result is positive then the repair operation is
kept viable.

Inventory is a major enemy of the company from a tax
point of view.  They will figure in that, as well as
the warehousing costs.

The best thing to do is be the first guy at / in the
dumpster on trash day.  My company actually GETS some
old spare parts from me, that I dumpster-dove for year
ago. Now, they give me the choice to take them before
they go in the dumpster, with the recogntion that I
will return the favor should that become an issue in
the future.

There is a bean-counter paradigm of the 80/20 rule...
80% of revenue comes from 20% of the customer base. So
if you can creatively PISS-OFF the 80% of customers
who don't hand you their fat wallets... you could be
better off (at least in theory).  I have heard this
expressed as "firing your customers".

Go to Interlink Electronics (FSR maker) and try to get
anything except an 10,000 piece OEM quantity, for
example.  I bought the experimenter kit for $100...
but there is probably no chance I'd ever do real
business with them. So Fvck me, I suppose :^P

H^) harry




--- WeAreAs1 at aol.com wrote:

> 
> In a message dated 11/24/04 6:07:00 AM,
> music.maker at gte.net writes:
> 
> << What you're talking about is something like a
> library where you would pay 
> to
> get information.  While I agree that it's a fine
> idea for me and you and all
> the other synth geeks out there, how could such a
> company make enough money to
> stay afloat?   >>
> 
> Scott, we're talking about Yamaha here.  They are
> the world's largest 
> manufacturer of musical instruments.  Even with my
> total lack of bean-counting 
> knowledge, I can safely venture a guess that they
> are not exactly having trouble 
> staying afloat.  To put things in perspective,
> Roland, one of their lesser 
> competitors, has a long-standing practice of keeping
> and providing parts and service 
> information for obsolete products as long as they
> still have access to those 
> parts, regardless of how old the product is.  That
> means you can call Roland 
> today and ask for a service manual for a Rhythm Ace
> drum machine (their very 
> first product, from the late 1960's), and it will be
> at your doorstep in a few 
> days.  If you need an odd IC or plastic piece from
> some long-gone Roland 
> product from the 1970's, they will still sell it to
> you -- as long as they still 
> have the parts in stock.  They even went as far as
> having a new run of custom 
> voice IC's fabbed for all the ailing Juno 106's out
> there, so they could take 
> care of service requests from old Juno users.  They
> have also gone to the trouble 
> of scanning their entire service manual library
> (hundreds of manuals) and 
> putting them up in an online PDF database for
> authorized service centers to 
> access (this is actually a cost-cutting act in the
> long run).  
> 
> In sharp comparison, we have Yamaha, the fattest of
> the fat cats...  Besides 
> the aforementioned complaints about service
> documentation, they have the 
> utterly maddening policy of not only not providing
> parts for older instruments (and 
> by "older", I mean just 10 years, which is Yamaha's
> arbitrary cutoff point), 
> they also actually destroy any stock they may have
> of spare parts for those 10 
> year old products.  That's right, they destroyed all
> remaining stocks of 
> custom voice IC's for the CS-series synths (CS-80,
> etc.).  They also destroyed all 
> remaining spare parts for the DX7 (in 1993, when
> thousands of musicians were 
> still using their DX7's as a daily bread-winning
> tool).  They sold over 
> 300,000 DX7 keyboards!  That's 300,000 potentially
> pissed-off customers who now 
> cannot buy a volume slider or custom FM IC to keep
> their beloved axe going for 
> another decade.  There are no third parties to call
> for those parts, either.  
> Those people, the very same folks who put Yamaha on
> the map and built them into a 
> synth-making giant in the 1980's, as Harry Bissell
> might say, are now 
> *fvcked*, thank you very much.  That's an awful lot
> of bad will for a company to 
> generate.  Seems rather penny-wise/pound-foolish, if
> you ask me -- or if you ask 
> those other 299,999 DX7 owners, and Roland obviously
> agrees.  I have had 
> conversations with both of Roland's recent national
> service managers about this very 
> topic, and they both were quite emphatic about
> Roland wanting to keep those 
> old customers as happy as possible.  They both said
> that keeping those old 
> parts and documents around does cost them money and
> space, but they, and the upper 
> management they answer to, feel that the good will
> earned is well worth the 
> cost.  They feel that their company has a legacy,
> and that honoring that legacy 
> and the customers who were there at the beginning
> helps to legitimize their 
> current efforts, and helps build a continuing loyal
> user base.  BTW, Roland 
> also keeps a handful of in-house service techs
> around who can actually 
> troubleshoot and repair old legacy equipment.  They
> will gladly take in your ailing 
> TB-303 or GR-300 and repair it for you, as long as
> they have the parts they need 
> (and they never discard or destroy old parts, they
> just use them until they run 
> out).
> 
> BTW, Kawai, who are not even in the M.I. game
> anymore (they just do pianos, 
> organs, and portable keyboards now) still provides
> parts and service for any 
> and all legacy products.  They are not a big
> company, yet they still do this 
> because they feel their customers are important.  I
> have also had discussions 
> about this with both their USA national service
> manager and with the president of 
> Kawai America, who is a very Japanese bean-counter
> of the highest order.  
> It's no wonder that Kawai customers are so loyal to
> the company.
> 
> As an authorized Moog service tech, I was able to
> buy spare parts and even 
> complete circuit boards for Minimoogs right up until
> Moog closed their doors in 
> 1986.  Was it keeping those old parts around that
> caused Moog to fail?  Not a 
> chance.  It was their failure to bring out products
> that could compete in the 
> markets of the day.  As has been mentioned here
> before, they had their chance 
> to license Chowning's FM concepts, and they could
> have been the ones to bring 
> a DX7-like product to the public.  If they had had
> the foresight to do so, we 
> might still be able to buy (Moog)DX7 parts today!
> (and Minimoog and Memorymoog 
> parts, too) (plus, I like the idea of a DX7 with a
> Moog ladder filter...how 
> cool would that be?)
> 
> Of course, corporations are free to do whatever they
> want.  Conversely, we 
> consumers can complain as loudly as we want about
> their stupid policies, and we 
> will continue to do so.  Yamaha CAN afford to have a
> more customer-friendly 
> service policy, and they should.  In the meantime,
> we do what we can to defend 
> ourselves against their greed and stupidity.  If
> that means lying to them in 
> order to get a fricking service manual, so be it!
> 
> As an aside, I'll mention that I recently tried to
> order a replacement 
> trackpad for a Korg Kaoss Pad 2 from Korg parts, and
> they told me that the part is 
> obsolete and no longer available.  WTF????  The
> Kaoss Pad 2 is a CURRENT Korg 
> product.  It's only been available for about 2
> years.  You can still buy brand 
> new ones at your local Guitar Center or Sam Ash. 
> Korg seems to be taking a 
> page from the Yamaha bean-counting book, and
> amplifying it.  Indeed, they have 
> the same 10-years-then-into-the-trash-bin spare
> parts policy that Yamaha has, 
> which makes a lot of M1 owners very, very mad.  And
> Wavestation owners.  And 
> 01/w owners.  And, and, and, and...  Just imagine if
> Ford or Chevrolet tried 
> something like this.  They'd be talking about it on
> the McLaughlin Group and Meet 
> the Press next Sunday morning!
> 
> To their partial credit, though, I must add that
> Yamaha and Korg are not the 
> very worst offenders.  Ensoniq is, and by far.  They
> never even provided 
> proper service manuals for any of their products. 
> No schematics, no 
> component-level repairs -- only expensive board
> swaps.  "Too proprietary", they claimed.  
> Yeah, as if any of their competitors were ever
> interested in stealing that 
> lovely Ensoniq Mirage technology to use inside their
> Akai S-1000 or Roland S-760 
> samplers.  Assholes.  Their products were shit,
> anyway.  I was glad to see them 
> drop out of the M.I. game.
> 
> Michael Bacich
> 
> P.S. -- having been a participant in product
> development for Kawai, I can 
> tell you that companies do specifically try to make
> super wonderful products.  
> The "mediocre device with slick presets" cynicism
> that you refer to may exist at 
> 
=== message truncated ===