some manner of little beast or thing

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.

you want to help stop tumblr from murdering itself? here's how!

• click this link and go to the support page, then click "contact support"
• click on the category list and click on feedback

• now you need to tell staff WHY putting in an algorithm will cause the site to fucking die, and be sure to be detailed and not a dick in it. theyre not gonna listen to feedback calling them assholes
• viola, if @staff listens, we'll be fine

i encourage you to reblog this so we can get as many people leaving feedback as humanly possible. we need to let staff know this is an utterly terrible idea

by the way, tumblr has turned off asks on all of their staff blogs, so this is the only way to tell tumblr how you feel

here it is again because uh. seems relevant.

hey @staff what the fresh fuck is this

wow i sure wonder 🤔🤔 what the new layouts supposed to look like 🤔🤔🤔🤔 its a mystery

Don’t forget y’all that there’s a much better way for us to let Tumblr know what we think about specific changes, rather than @ ing staff or wip, and it’s sending in a support ticket and choosing feedback!

Tumblr reverted some of the asinine app decisions they made after a concerted feedback effort! So make sure to use this form! It’s what it’s for, but it’s not well advertised!

source

You know Elon probably saw this and was super mad he still can't fire Halli.

Girl kys fr

Empire of Japan, for all its faults, was ready to end World War II before the bomb. The diplomats literally asked to surrender to the USA, but asked to let the Soviet Union be at the negotiating table because the Soviet Union's Red Army was a short distance from Hokkaido (reaching the Sakhlins and Manchuria) and was sure to launch an attack on it. Hokkaido, being one of the so-called Home Islands (I don't like this term for Hokkaido), was just as dire in the eyes of the politicians of the Empire of Japan as the impending invasion on Kyushu.

Since the USA did not want to do a joint trusteeship of Japan like with Korea or heaven forbid, risk the USSR being the sole influencer of Japan, rather than letting the USSR get in on the negotiation, the USA demanded unconditional surrender. This was something that the Empire of Japan could not do, given that the USA's ally in the war would still fight them after the surrender. So, of course, the diplomats declined, and this is used as a pretext to nuke 2 cities full of civilians (including non-Japanese civilians). They dropped a horrific weapon never used before or since on a country that's ready to surrender because they didn't want their allies at the negotiating table. Is that the "best option"? For whom? The USA? At what cost? Just admit to yourself that millions of Asian civilian lives aren't human in your eyes if it means the USA gets a new country to exploit if this is the line you're pushing.

don’t lose the notes:

#they always see ‘pixie’ and ‘dream’ and ‘girl’#but forget the terrible awesome driving power of ‘manic’

Brian Molko of Placebo is being investigated by Italian authorities for (correctly, lol) calling Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni racist, fascist and (perhaps a little less correctly) "a nazi" and (again, correctly) "a piece of sh..." at a concert last week...

I’ve given, what I have

I showed you, I’m growing

The ashes, fall slowly

As your voice, consoles me

~After Dark, Mr Kitty (x)