This is an older story. The narrative that it failed because it was too good is false. It was a private equity leveraged buyout that doomed it. The company got saddled with like 8x debt with a lot of that money going to dividends for the PE firm.
The product and the brand were strong enough that they've been sold to a different firm in the bankruptcy. If they are competently managed they should be fine.
The problem is how the debts got there in the first place—in pursuit of growth for its own sake, of increased output with no clear needs that the new output would address.
What i still don't quite understand with these kind of buyouts is who lends them the money and who gets saddled with the debt? Surely banks know the drill and wouldn't want to borrow and hold debt for a company destined to fail in such a way.
Do banks get repaid before that happens and the only people being owed are small contractors and employees? Does the bank repackage the debt and sell it to someone else? Or are the interest payments high enough to just factor in losing part of the money borrowed with high certainty?
The founders knew what they were doing. This was their way of cashing out some of the company while continuing to run it. All of the private equity tricks are designed to avoid paying taxes in the process.
The product didn't fail, American business culture failed.
they should have worked this into the title:
"A company needs to grow.
In the past few decades, the idea that every company should be growing, predictably and boundlessly and forever, has leached from the technology industry into much of the rest of American business."
The thing wrong with a stable company is that it doesn't afford those at the top uncontrollable, disproportionate influence and profit.
American business culture disdains stable companies that maintain their size.
American business culture advocates for and promotes unlimited expansion and profit increase above all else, which is obviously unsustainable and distracts from creating good products or social benefit If you put a moment of thought into it, and benefits the one or few at the top while exploiting everybody else.
When that venture inevitably fails, the winners at the top get to exploit their ill-gotten profit to influence culture at large, radicalize the exploited and propagate the exploitative system.
The winners are shuffled around, and continue making obscene profit from each successive top position at the expense of their society, simultaneously creating and breaking laws to further their selfish, unsustainable gain.
Someone needs to create a business that bails out/buys excellent quality products and produces them in a small enough scale that only new owners will need.
Consider it an excellent achievement for a product to make it here. Only the best buy it for life products.
I have a theory that shitty products fundamentaly out-compete good products today because its way cheaper to market your product as good than to actually develop it well. I call it the craptocracy
Because it is made redundant by literally everything else that is already in your kitchen. You can't name one thing this appliance does that a pressure cooker, stove/oven and crock pot don't already do.
It also doesn't replace any of those other devices so unless you're a college dorm resident it's just another massive thing on your counter for basically no value or reason
Just because you didn't see value in the product doesn't mean others don't. It saved space for me because I don't need a slow cooker, rice cooker, pressure cooker, yogurt maker etc. They're all gone and replaced with a one stop shop of "if it's wet it goes in the IP".
It simplified processes and made them amazingly repeatable too. Stocks are a breeze: set, forget, comeback when it beeps. I don't nurse temperatures, times and don't stress things boiling over, boiling dry, getting too hot or not hot enough.
Sterilisation for brewing: come back when it beeps. Yogurt making: come back when it beeps. Dough fermenting: come back when it beeps. Soup: come back when it beeps.
My fiancée wouldnt touch pressure cooking because she's anxious it will explode, now she comes back when it beeps.
It doesn't do anything as well as any dedicated device true enough, but it's good enough to not buy those things and just use the IP. I'd have to eat a lot of rice to get a rice cooker as well as an IP.
Wtf is this? You can still buy them and other instant pot products on Amazon. Not to mention they still sell well. I have had mine and use it almost daily for 5 years and the seals are still good. Easy to clean, easy to use.
I guess the hypercapitalist definition of failed is that people bought them, and then sales & revenue dropped. Like it would happen with a quality product.
Once everyone had their instant pots that are really reliable and rarely break, instant had to come up with something else to sell and make money. In the pursuit of that, they made a lot of bad choices, including taking on debt, and didn't find the same success they had with instant pot.
Yep. I've had mine for 6 years and it's still incredible. Luckily compatible sealing rings are still available from 3rd party vendors. Makes great Greek Yogurt, Chicken Soup, and Steel Cut Oats. And of course , it can make so much more.
It sucks that when you make something this good, you're destined to put yourself out of business, meanwhile planned obsolescence works...
The biggest failure here is the number of people who obviously didn't read the article. Why comment if you don't know what you're actually commenting about? Is this the writing equivalent to loving the sound of your own voice?
Edit: I can't believe my latest most controversial take is "maybe don't discuss what an article says unless you read it first". Just can't make this shit up.
That's fine but, if you don't read the article, don't comment on it like you did. I'm not suggesting that's what you did, but that's clearly what many people here did.
If there's a pay wall and you don't use something like 12ft.io or archive.ph to get around it, just don't comment. There's no requirement to comment and those that do so without knowing what the article is actually about are providing commentary on their imaginations.
They got toys R us'd by corporate bookeeping shenanigans where they take debt from other companies and dump it all into one business which destroys it.
Articles that lie to me like this make me want to punch the author in their momma smoocher.
I can recommend the Sage/breville "fast and slow go 6L" cooker if you cannot or don't want to get the instant pot. I have had mine for 2 years now and its solid build and i have used it a lot. Makes excellent youghurt and risotto among others.
As soon as my autocorrect is contaminated with spelling errors I'm doomed. For some reason when spelling a word wrong just twice or thrice it's automatically added to the dictionary which is so stupid. So in reality it's not me spelling it wrong because I'm ignorant, it's because autocorrect does not actually correct me when I need it and it's teaching me back my own mistakes. I have the same issue with the word "very" that I spell "verry" because it got into the dictionary once and I never knew it was wrong until much later and I had alread learned the muscle memory. Who was supposed to teach me anyway at this point. I'm far past school.
perhaps you could read the article, but the jist is that in this economic system the good product was so good that people bought it and then sales dried as nobody needed another, rendernng the company bankrupt.
It’s a failure when despite that the company goes bankrupt and the product stops being made. Consider actually reading the article. It’s the story of terrible business culture inside private equity firms that causes amazing products to keep disappearing. Being an amazing product makes you the target of these scumbags the very first time you stumble as a business. So you can tongue in cheek argue that is what causes you to fail.
The business folks are projecting on the customers. If the customers have a product that lasts them forever, then this is a success.
Edit: it doesn't matter what happens to the company. The only thing that matters is if the customers were happy. If you focus on the things that matter, this was a triumph. A huge success.