Heathkit is back

[Stoller]

Check out http://www.heathkit.com/heathkit-faq.html


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[Michael Black]

On Tue, 9 Jul 2013, Stoller wrote:

Check out http://www.heathkit.com/heathkit-faq.html


No, Heathkit is not back.

Someone bought the rights to the name, and apparently whatever was left
over, and is making another stab. This about 20 years after the company
stopped making kits, after the company made a big fuss about getting back
into kits a few years back, with a couple of ridiculous offerings and a
suggetion of more, and then boing bankrupt.

This has to be another company starting up, having bought the right to use
the name. They aren't offering kits, they haven't got any products yet,
time will tell.

"Heathkit" means nothing in itself. It's not the name that matters, it's
being a viable business making electronic kits. In the old days, Heathkig
put out a wide range of products, and all the kits were designed to be put
together by anyone (they'd test out the new kits on the secretaries who'd
never put a kit together before). Heathkit wasn't just about electronics
and amateur radio, it was about the Boonie Bike, and the organ kit, and
the marine electronics, and the stereo equiment, and so on. They offered
a product that actually was lower in price than buying an assembled
product, so endless people with little or no interest in electronics or
actually building followed the instructions and got the item they wanted
at a reduced price.

And that faded as electronics got more complicated, as things moved from
hand wired tube equipment to solid state equipment that could easily be
assembled by machinery. The kits became a liability, no lnoger a means of
saving money but something that cost extra to produce. So they lost all
the wide range of customers who wanted a tv set cheaper or that fish
finder cheaper, which meant only the people who wanted to build kits were
customers, and rising costs meant they couldn't pay all the bills.

The name doesn't matter, producing viable kits that won't cost a whole lot
is. And of course, one hallmark of a Heathkit was the detailed
construction manuals, there are plenty of kits still available but most of
them require some skill to put together, require some skill to get going.

Heathkit won't be back unless they can produce products, and ones that
people are interested in and willing to pay for.

And we don't see any of that yet.

I should point out that a few years ago, someone made a big fuss about how
he was going to relaunch Popular Electronics. He claimed he'd bought the
rights to the name, and then had some kickstarter campaign that never
reached its objective. Got a lot of hype, people orgasming at the mere
mention of "Popular Electronics", but it was all misleading. The name
didn't mean a thing, it was contents that mattered. If he spent much on
the rights to the name (and oddly I never saw any verifying statement to
that effect), he wasted the money that was better spent on trying to
launch a magazine. The whole project faded, not much trace of it remains.

I should also point out that the pompous fool had a very misleading
understanding of the magazine. His declaration made it sound like PE was
only useful when it launched the ALtair 8800, and he didn't know that
Steve Wozniak was the real designer of the Apple II (or that Steve Jobs
was off elsewhere when the HomeBrew Computer Club started up), or that
Bill Gates was off in Boston and then New Mexico when the Homebrew
Computer Club was started, and likely never attended. After all, there is
the famous "Open Letter to Computer Hobbyists" where he denounces the
illegal copying of Microsoft BASIC, and that was very much aimed at
Homeberw Computer Club.

It's not a wonder that he failed, he didn't understand the magazine.

This new project sounds identical. The name is more important than the
product, make lots of hype early on but no products. Time will tell.
Heathkit when it went back into kits a few years back, that got a lot of
hype, people too excited by the notion to realize the first few kits were
useless, just blindly accepting that "heathkit was back in the kit
business".

Michael