Re: Micro Men

[nev young]

Stuart Brady wrote:
On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 06:13:24PM +0100, Thomas Harte wrote:
Oh, I don't know. Surely Sinclair's model works only if you can
establish yourself as the supplier of a proprietary computer aimed at
the price conscious end of the market? I don't see how that could
compete once a growing body of manufacturers were transferring to a
PC-style open architecture. At some point economies of scale amongst
the open people outweigh whatever economies you can achieve with a
custom design and there's no way back from there.

I'm slightly younger than the Spectrum -- I'm aware of some of the
history, but never saw any of this first hand...

It seems to me that Sir Clive would never have been hugely worried
about maintaining a strong position within the market in the long
term... of course, that's not to say that he wouldn't have appreciated
having a 'cash cow' to fund his other project...

I was thinking more along the lines of the UK having a manufacturing 
base. If, instead of many small fragmented companies all setting up 
their own manufacturing plant, there had been larger companies who could 
have outsourced the build to UK manufactures then it is just possible 
that the UK would have become what Taiwan is now. Even Bruce and Alan 
had to set up their own plant to build Sam using venture capital. How 
would things have panned out if they could have just had the build done 
by an existing UK company, who was already tooled up to build computers. 
 They wouldn't have needed as much capital and it might not have been 
clawed back quite so quickly. Even Amstrad might have built their 
machines here rather than in Japan.

Of course, the past is passed and we can only hypothesise on how things 
might have been. It was a fun ride while it lasted.

Nev