Path: utzoo!mnetor!lsuc!jimomura From: jimomura@lsuc.uucp (Jim Omura) Newsgroups: can.politics Subject: Re: R & D Message-ID: <1988Jan5.213620.16907@lsuc.uucp> Date: 6 Jan 88 02:36:18 GMT References: <1987Dec31.122642.19862@lsuc.uucp> <1276@looking.UUCP> Reply-To: jimomura@lsuc.UUCP (Jim Omura) Distribution: can Organization: Consultant, Toronto Lines: 80 In article <1276@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: >In article <1987Dec31.122642.19862@lsuc.uucp> jimomura@lsuc.UUCP (Jim Omura) writes: >>In the case of [Batteries Included], it's *clear* that Canadian >>jobs were lost. > >I'm not sure I understand this. Batteries Included was bought by a Canadian >public company, and afterwards it collapsed. You're right. In fact, I had mashed the story a bit in my mind while I was writing this piece. Most of what I know about the Batteries Included story is rumour anyway, so I'd appreciate it if anybody who knows the facts better could tell me what really happenned. In fact, They were an Ontario corp. bought out by a western company. It is unclear why the purchase occurred, but I recall that I heard for a while before the collapse occurred, that the running of the company and development was going to move west. There seemed to be some "bailing out" by programmers, and then sometime later BI was gone. I was mixing up a "foreign" takeover in the sense that it was outside the Province of origin with the fact that the assets seem to have wound up in US hands in the end. Nonetheless, the speed with which it happens makes one suspicious that the whole thing was a "strip the assets and run" buyout rather than a serious attempt at expanding the company and running it for increased profitability. Let it be noted that clearly *any* buyout of a company can be for either reason and it need not be that "foreign" takeovers will necessarily be worse in that respect than any other. However, I think it's clear that the presures are such that sucking the bought out company dry is more likely to happen, and in a more detrimental way, when the buyer is foreign. There's the fact that it's harder for the employees of the bought out company to move to the new head office, or factory, or the fact that you can move production across the border to your "home" territory to placate "local politicians" and simply shut down the "foreign" branch completely. Goodyear in New Toronto did that within the last year. They argued that the New Toronto plant was not economically competitive. That belies the fact that it's a company's choice where they put updated technology to *keep* a plant economically competitive. > >After everything was ruined, Electronic Arts came in and purchased the >assets, preserving the contracts with most of the developers. > >Certainly jobs were lost, as in any company failure. But the job loss >had nothing to do with international matters. In fact, the US company helped >preserve income for some folks, at least for a while. Of course, not for >long, since the Atari ST never turned into a major machine the way people >wanted. Brad, just because your company's product for the ST isn't selling well doesn't mean nobody is making money in the ST world. Quite the opposite. I know some programmers who are doing *very* well programming for the Amiga and the Atari ST both. It *is* a "major" machine. Alice is nice, and I've given it mention on BIX. Heck, it's more than nice. It's *wonderful*! But the market right now is mainly C in terms of languages, and for whatever reason, outside of C, Modula-2 is growing and among Pascals, OSS is selling, but nowhere near the level of the various C compilers. I would not translate your sales into a generality. Beyond that there's the fact that BI wasn't just selling ST products. They were riding mainly off Commodore 64 sales I'd expect, and had work being done in the PC area. Furthermore, they were not, as far as I know, paying advances on the development contracts, so that their development expenses were kept fairly minimal. I had been to their offices and the offices were fairly new, and very large. It could be that they overdid expansion, but if you look at the history of the company, I have doubts about that kind of mistake. They seemed very cautious -- having had their store down on Queen St. for quite a while before making the decision to become strickly a software company. -- Jim Omura, 2A King George's Drive, Toronto, (416) 652-3880 ihnp4!utzoo!lsuc!jimomura Byte Information eXchange: jimomura