[floatrock]

...or be bought by a private equity firm with a spreadsheet that says the craft-built premium reputation can be gutted and slapped onto cheaply-made versions for x years before the market notices the shift but by then enough profit will have been extracted that acquiring and gutting the brand will have made net positive financial returns.

There's a famous story that I believe Henry Ford scavenged junk yards for broken Model T's. Every time he found one, he recorded what was broken. After finding enough of them, he figured out the part that was never broken was something like the front axle assembly. So he went to his axle engineers, told them they built it too strong, and find ways to cut costs.

[will_pseudonym]

I sold computers and computer accessories at a big box store, and there was an HP rep that would sometimes hang out in the printer aisle to answer questions and evangelize HP printers. I remember he told me a story of how, when HP printers were built really solidly, the CEO had a meeting where he demonstrated this by standing on the printer, and it didn't budge. The takeaway to this wasn't, "Hey, we make a great product. Look at this!" It was, "Hey, we make too durable of a product. We should cut costs because this is costing too much!"