Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

Just to clarify:

I have ZERO plans to "slow down" or "wind down" or "shut down". I DO have
plans to "slow down" and
take a wait-and-see attitude.

This mainly involves not ordering lots of expensive parts (like pots) in the
near term. So kits may
run out 4 months from now, and be out for 3-4 weeks. This is better than
having $30,000 worth of parts
sitting in the garage and having sales be 20% of what they are now.

I run on a 'cash' basis: by the time you see your kit/module, the parts have
LONG been paid for. A plot
of running profit versus time looks like a sawtooth :) You try to anticipate
the 'peak' on the curve IF AND WHEN
the market nosedives.

What is probably going to happen (and I know MANY of you fall into this
category, which worries me) is that
'web authoring' jobs will disappear off the map, along with 80% of ALL
Internet-related jobs. This trickles down
to computers, routers, semis, memory, all sorts of things. Too many people
last year saw too much money to be
made. The bridge could only support so much weight. There is a finite amount
of money to be made. People
were under the impression 'the sky's the limit'. Ha, no one ASKED me! :)

Also, electronics as a whole is a victim of their own 'bullets'. 300mm
wafers at 0.18um can produce 80,000 op amps
PER WAFER, and you can run 20 wafers/day. High-speed Fuji SMT pick-and-place
machines can "stuff" a PC
motherboard in 17 seconds and a DVD player in about 8 seconds. Electronics,
when I was a kid, was a 'gee whiz'
product sector with long lead-times. Factories now make this stuff so fast
it's crazy (this is adjunct to the depressing
fact that of the last 27 years of my career, the first 25yrs has EVERY
product I worked on in a landfill, OBSOLETE).

So, "industry" is just dealing with "overpopulation". American Airlines
doesn't need 12 flights to SFA from DFW a day.
Where can Intel go? Will ANYONE CARE if they have a 10GHz uP? ZZzzzzzzz.

Sorry for the rant (triggered by Nortel laying off 15,000 MORE people
today). Please don't, in ANY way, feel guilty
or remorseful if you can't buy more modules, now or ever. If it all closed
up tomorrow, I would STILL consider MOTM a
FABULOUS SUCCESS. But I still want to ship Module #5000!!! (1/2 of the way
there).

Paul S.