Reply To: Good summary about B&O’s descent

[Stan]

I really don’t know what other choice they have.  The general population doesn’t care about HiFi. I remember when there were hifi stores all over the place.  They’re all gone, except for a handful that mostly do custom installations. How do you do “consumer electronics” when most consumers just don’t care enough to drop big $$$ on it. If you’re going to find a niche, it might as well be VHNWI since that’s where the money is. I’d rather they do this than sell out to Harmon or some other conglomerate (or worse, private equity) who will a) immediate drop support for any old products integration and b) produce watered down badge engineered garbage (like the car audio division). I’m not a VHNWI so I’m not happy about this direction, but again, what choice do they have. I can admire from a far.

Obviously, they should do better with their software, and they’ve probably lost a fair margin of customers who bought a less expensive product and had software issues and cross B&O off their list.  Then again, show me 1 company that does great software. Even Apple is bad now. My wife hates here newer iPhone… glitchy, buggy, etc. Customers have shown companies that they’ll tolerate buggy software by continuing to buy it so software managment say “good enough” far too early. I’d love to stop this, but I don’t know how. If I promised to never buy buggy software, I’d have no software at all!