Author: Fernando Villegas
Date: 13:04:15 05/13/01
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This industry still is, was and will be trapped in the same structural weakneses: a) a tiny professional market and a moderate "mass" market disputed by too many companies for the money that can be got. B) margins of profit going down due to technological development. In the 80's you could ask hundreds of dollars for a plastic piece of junk made in china encassing a processor the size of a nail. Cost: 25 dollars: Price: 150 dollars. Now you can ask perhaps 50 bucks for a CD that cost maybe 10 or 15 to produce, all included. Absolute and percentual margins going down... C) plastic shit made in China could not be copied as CD are. d) In old times there were perhaps 4 important players: Fidelity, Hagener, Saitek, Novag. Even so two of them went down very soon. Now you have dozens of commercial or non commercial players: every chess program that can be put in the Web is a competitor in his own; every programmer than can produce some Cd's is a player; every one can do that with almost no investment. And all goes for the same market. Survival in these conditions for a dedicated chess producing company is possible only -and even with lot of problems- with a moderately, familiar size and kind of company, Schroeder-style. Reduced cost, the owners makes his own programs, the wife of one of them sell the tickets, the nephew answer the phone, etc. The other way, the Millenium way, even the Chessbase way, is not viable in the long or even middle term shot. It is a matter of sheer numbers... Fernando
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