Wiardgroup

--- In wiardgroup@yahoogroups.com, "Gary Chang" <gchang@...> wrote:
>
> Enough of this hangling, gentlemen!
> 

WHAT!!!!!!????
and give up show biz????????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
;'>

Hi all,

i was really interested in where this discussion would go if the old
same 'f.o.g.'s (friends of Grant) stayed out of it for a while. i hope
that , if nothing, else Grant can see that amongst the enormous
diversity of attitudes, personalities, and form-factor religions out
here in Wiardo land, there is broad and deep support for his IDEAS.
This approbation has been expressed very eloquently by quite a few of
you in April's messages. Another thing that i note is that there is a
much clearer comprehension of two phenomena: 

1) the particularly nasty roadblocks that face a cottage electronics
artisan in this tiny niche market 

2) the particularly nasty roadblocks that form between the ears of ANY
visionary designer forced to perform the roles of material procurement
manager, CFO, markerting director, webmaster, adminstrative staff,
chef, and production manager*** , all just in order to have enough
money to eat , much less find enough OTA's to keep the 300's alive.

i'm very peasantly surprised.
i underestimated y'all. i really did not realize how many of you 'get it'.
wow!

That said, i comprehend John's disappointment. His goodwill toward
Wiard is not in dispute in my mind. Though my contact with him is
vicarious, i know by indirect means that he is a generous and erudite
fellow and a careful and skilled engineer himself. He was an early
customer of Wiard long before it had acquired it's 'eBay cachet'.
From my perspective, John's complaints are not only his prerogative as
a customer in a free market but they have real merit in the context of
the current market for synth modules. 
Most of the market for these gadgets is based on a retail commodity
model (see http://www.analoguehaven.com/). -In that context-, Wiard's
policies don't stack up well.  But this is where my position diverges
from John's expressed comments. Regardless of the why's and
wherefores, Grant has chosen to steer his business away from a retail
commodity model to a cost-plus specialty model . In that context
Grants 'call for price' policy is de rigeur and 'back in full
production' is merely a modulation of component stocks and leadtime
estimates. In the climate of expectations and what's considered normal
for the general modular marketplace, these pronouncements from Grant
are indsputably prone to easy misapprehension. 
i can also grasp the disappointment because this is unequivocally a
change from previous policies.  Grant has tried to shoehorn his
business into the retail 'internet vending machine' mold a couple of
times now and the plain truth is that it doesn't work for him. i've
witnessed just how much havoc these attempts have wreaked on Grant's
livelyhood. 

But on the other end of the see-saw from Wiard's inconvenience,
eccentricity, epehemeral policies & communications is the possibility
of a sustainable model that matches the designer to a livelyhood and a
modicum of security. 

Does this mean some tradeoffs that won't sit well with customers who
liked the previous model(s) better?....Damn sure does!

Grant is making this up as he goes along, this is the opposite of the
current conventional wisdom  of a push-button marketplace. I sense
even a bit of deliberate protest in it. At the risk of presumption on
my relationship with him, Grant is fully aware that his policies are
an irritation to a portion of the potential market. But he's tried-on
a series of more conformist personae and they all fit very badly. To
my mind this is consummate (if quixotic) integrity. Grant goes his own
way. He's spurned family, financial security, and to a degree, his own
health in order to chase his singular techno-artistic dream. He did so
advisedly and with full knowledge of the potential sacrifices. Like
SuperChicken, He knew the job was dangerous when he took it! The fact
that he declines to cater to notions and policies extraneous to his
private muse kind of appeals to me, even if it means i have to pay
twice as much for the second Sequantizer as i did for my first. 
The concession he'll have to grant me is that he'll have to wait twice
as long for me to save up the money.... but, in all honesty, i bet
he's fine with that.
After an all-too-short visit to Mabuse Manor, my family coined a phrase...

(best combined with an insouciant Gallic shrug)
'c'est le Grant!'

 shalom!
-doc

*** (i'm sure Grant can tell me what i left out of this list of hats)