[angry_octet]

That's exactly what weak management does. Family management is especially prone to this IME. Cut new investment, cut cost of inputs, labour, quality control.

That works as long as you have weak competitors (or a moat) and nothing terrible happens, like high defects. Essentially you're coasting on prior investment. But as soon as something changes in the market you're falling behind.

What I've often observed is that new low cost competitors introduce features which are often reserved for high end devices/products due to market segmentation. The dominant player refuses to adapt and hence they lose all their low end market share, the volume of which is necessary to make the whole thing work. Meanwhile new customers start with the lost cost ecosystem.

I've seen this happen with e.g. Agilent, or SaaS companies, who charge 10x for something that costs little, like SaML/AD auth.

Imagine if NVIDIA had charged for CUDA or considered it a distraction from selling graphics cards. They wouldn't own the HPC/ML space if they had done that.