Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?
They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.
Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?
So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.
And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn’t compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn’t sell.
And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at… putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.
If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn’t have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that’s what they did.
I don’t know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.
lmao tumblr letting their users choose whether or not they want their likes to be public but then pulling a twitter 2.0 and showing your likes on your followers’ dashboards and specially saying who liked the posts in their new update, without the users’ consent or a way to turn it off, is actually pretty insane.
like how many times to we — the users — have to tell them we don’t want tumblr to be like any other social media platforms and that tumblr’s being different than twitter, instagram, tiktok is actually what makes us stay on this silly little site.
respectfully @staff you’re driving your users away. stop trying to “fix” things that are good and don’t need to be fixed. we want tumblr to be tumblr. we don’t want the site to be twitter or instagram 2.0
The new layout it a whole mess. Thankfully Xkit can already help with a bunch of this! I’m sure it’ll give more options soon.
Vanilla Tumblr: (I have marked in red what can be removed. The tabs can be set not to stick, so you will really only see them at the top of your dash. Empty box on the left for hidden notifications and shop sparkle, i just didn’t have any. I’m EU so no Live for me).
ID: A retweet of a DiscussingFilm tweet by Emily @memilies. The original tweet contains a picture of Louis and Lestat from Interview With The Vampire and reads: “Interview With The Vampire Season 2 has halted filming due to the studio’s unwillingness to give the actors fair pay and working conditions.” The retweet reads “I love this phrasing, more of this please.”
stats: insert your own statistics currently (re)watching: hunter x hunter, mob psycho 100, bojack horseman currently listening to: rina sawayama, deb never etc: insert whatever extra you'd like here!
