amcluesent;526897 Wrote: > It'll made a great MBA case-study on how to mismanage an acquisition. > Just for starters - > > + Bungling the marketing by pre-announcing product > + Allowing on-line rumours to dominate > + Loss of market share as people give up waiting and buy Sonos > + Turning consumer evangelists into apologists > + Draining down the supply chain just as the market sector was breaking > out of early-adopters > + Moving to a pricing model based on gouging, wrecking brand values > + Losing corporate memory and ejecting the founders > + Having no message to existing hi-end customers on product > development > > You couldn't make it up! > Did anyone really think Logitech just planned to buy Slim Devices and let them live their own life within Logitech without doing any changes ?
In most cases an acquisition means that you want to take the good parts of the company you are buying and mix it with you own current or new strategy. This usually cause some disturbances during the period when the changes are applied, something we have seen during the last year(s). In some cases an acquisition ends up in a failure in other cases it ends up as a success, but in both cases there are usually a period of chaos before the new strategy/organization has settled. From the outside, you only see the negative things during this period because you usually don't know what the plans are. In some companies you don't see anything from the outside, in this case we do because Slim Devices used a very open development process where community was involved. Loosing founders after an acquisition isn't that unusual, actually I think this is very often the situation. People used to manage a small company can often feel too restricted in a big organization and they also often have a contract that they have to stay for a year or two after the acquisition before they are allowed to bail out, I obviously have no idea if this is the case here. It's sad that Sean/Dean left but to be honest I'm not that surprised it happened. Regarding the product announcement there are several factors to consider: - Pictures of the Touch was leaked long time before the official announcement - Real Touch hardware was leaked by some distributors before the official announcement If this hadn't happened I suspect it would had been announced a lot later than it was. Logitech was more or less forced to announce it when the hardware was leaked even though they at that time couldn't be 100% sure when the software was going to be finished. Delays in software projects is pretty common and in particular it is even pretty common in the history of Squeezebox development. On top of all this Logitech has done several re-organizations during the last year and made changes in the Squeezebox team, probably to try to merge the old Slim Devices with the correct business units within Logitech. With a situation like that it isn't easy to estimate a release date. IMHO, the biggest issue during all this is the communication with the users, especially people that pre-ordered the products, that part could really have been performed a lot better. However, we should also realize that it's in this area where Slim Devices and Logitech are VERY different. Slim Devices is used to have a very close relation with their early adopters while I suspect Logitech probably isn't. Also, there isn't many other pre-announced Logitech products which have had the same "must have" factor as the Radio, Battery and the Touch, so this situation might be pretty new to them. I'm not trying to say that Logitech management has done it perfectly, there are a lot of things that from an outside view could have been done a lot better. However, what I'm trying to say is that there might be reasons for the current situation which we aren't aware of. I'm 99% sure that Logitech management is aware of that the current situation isn't a good one and do what they can to fix it. Still, do we really think it helps to tell them they've done a bad job ? If we really want the Squeezebox products to survive and really want to help them making this happen, there might be better way to do this than only criticizing them. Don't get me wrong, constructive critique is good, but after posting that it might be better to try to help them making the products a success: - Help with beta testing and report bugs - Post or register enhancements requests regarding things you like to see in current (Radio) or future products (Touch). A lot of things have to be improved, but at the moment the top priority have to be to finish the Touch so Logitech can start to get some income from it. Releasing before it's ready with a lot of bugs is a bad idea, it will just make the situation even worse because then Logitech will have to handle all the support issues instead. -- erland Erland Isaksson 'My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info) (Install my plugins through Extension Downloader) (Developer of 'TrackStat, SQLPlayList, DynamicPlayList, Custom Browse, Custom Scan, Custom Skip, Multi Library, Title Switcher and Database Query plugins' (http://wiki.erland.isaksson.info/index.php/Category:SlimServer)) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=76286 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
