[Coco] At RadioShack, a history of hits and missed chances

[Frank Pittel]

On Sun, Oct 05, 2014 at 08:25:41AM -0700, Chris Osborn wrote:
> 
> On Oct 5, 2014, at 8:01 AM, <davidlinsley at gmail.com> <davidlinsley at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2024676003_radioshackanalysisxml.html
> > 
> > This article was in today's Settle Times and is a reprint from a Fort Worth Star-Telegram article. No mention of the CoCo directly, and mostly mainstream press fluff, but some mainstream coverage of Radio Shacks woes none the less.
> 
>     "And the market for hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers has evaporated"
> 
> Not even close! It has grown a lot, and has a whole new culture associated with it, known as "maker." And Radio Shack knows it. That same culture is the one that made them huge, their problem is that they have largely abandoned that market and think they need to sell things that appeal to everyone. Yes, I know mail order can undercut Radio Shack, but there's a lot of times when you gotta have something right now or you want to inspect something in person to make sure the part is going to fit.
> 
> Someone at Radio Shack has been trying to get in on the maker movement, they tie in with Make magazine a lot. Heck, they even sent me free tickets to Maker Faire last year because I posted some silly things I made on twitter! I think though it must be a very small team that's trying to get back into the hobbyist/diy/maker market because in-store they are constantly clearancing parts & tools.
> 
> The hobbyist & DIY market is bigger than it ever was, they just need to stop turning those people away.

While the hobbyist and DIY market is huge I don't think that it's bigger then ever. Anyone remember Heath Kits and the various electronics magazines from the 70s
What's happened is that the nature of it has changed! It used to be mostly ham operators, etc but now has moved away from that and towards microcontroller based 
projects with a large emphasis on home made robotics.  Radio Shack has completely missed the boat on the change and I don't know how they can get to be taken
seriously in the hobbyist market anymore. The internet has really hurt their market but hasn't killed it completely. Near where I live there is a Fry's and Microcenter
and they both have a larger selection of DIY hobbyist electronics kits and parts relevant to the current market then any Radio Shack!! I can even go to Fry's and buy
resistors, capacitors and transistors.

During the mid to late eighties decided to get into selling consumer grade toys like cheap RC cars, etc. When the bottom fell out of that they get into phones and have
completely abandoned the hobbyist market! Now the hobbyist market has abandoned Radio Shack.

The Other Frank