Goes in cycles
Remember back in the 80's & 90's when all of the brands sold off their auxillary business in order to "Concentrate on our core business ".
Electroluxe flogging off Husqvarna being an example we are all familiar with .
This was the fashion back then and every time they sold off something their share price skyrocketed so the directors paid themselves massive bonuses.
Then the leaner , less capital intense company showed a higher profit to equity ratio , another method used to determine bonuses for executives & board members .
Then of course either they acquired their competitior so they paid themselves more bonuses or their nearest rival bought them out so they paid themselves massive redundency bonuses .
Are you seeing the common thread here, bigger bonuses , more often .
While the capitalists go on endlessly about the "value of competition" none of them believe in it and none attempt to practice it because in reality every capitalist market tends towards monopoly .
In theory a monopoly is the most efficient method of manufacture because it can envoke the highest level of common parts thus volume effiency .
The down side is it smothers innovation because money spent in research in profits is not available to shareholders
And profits to shareholders comes a close second to bonuses to executives in the priorities of management .
Big companies never innovate because of the cost of a market failure and the end result is "they are all made out of ticky tacky & they all look just the same "
And once again Husqvarna is the perfect example now offering 100 choices of the same thing in different colours and not a one of them anywhere near as good as they were before being gobbled up by Husqvarna and indeed their own brand name products dropping in quality like a stone .
Back when there really was 30 different mower factories you got products that actually worked and things like dedicated mulching decks or dedicated bagging decks
Now days you get universal decks that bag, mulch or throw, all the same ,,,,, badly because it is more profitable for the very large companies to make just one deck style .
So if you want a bagger that actually works then you have to buy a Walker or Grasshopper
Throwing decks used to have near 1" of overlap on their cutting circles so they never left rooster tails till the blades were worn so badly there was no flute left on the blades .
Now days if you get a year out of a set of blades before they start leaving rooster tails you are lucky and double cutting has become accepted .
All of this is share holder driven
and when I say shareholder, do not think about mom & pop's retirement nest egg.
We are talking about Shiek Yabooty looking for more profits from his petro dollars or Borris Yeltsen trying to find some way to wash is looted money from the Russian treasury , or some of the other trillionairs with more money in the bank than there are people on the planet .
finance.yahoo.com
