I think they share intellectual property. But l guess if you were not under the Pro cost centre on DDay you might be ear market for the front door.
I think they share intellectual property. But l guess if you were not under the Pro cost centre on DDay you might be ear market for the front door.
The historical account of post war Eco re construction is interesting but more recent events; the rise of China's economy and it impact on global trade; then the GFC and its epicentre in the US banking system; the sharp fall off in USA manufacturing employment that followed with the recession in 2009 paved the way for what is the 5 year plans most large business and CEOs look at with floated company's. Most of them are around for that long and it takes that long to implement large scale change. Given the technologies under the Harman banner a global market makes sense as does capitalising on the strong auto markets. The entry into lifestyle markets is more a "me too" effort in an already crowded market.
Interestingly l watched a documentary on the 2015 Mustang last night. They are on sale here (Aust) as Ford has dropped the Falcon which has been in manufacture in Aust for 40 years. There are no doubt job losses as a result.
The decisions of what goes on and where are much the same with Ford and Harman. The CEOs probably share a game of golf.
I don't think anyone is disagreeing it was going to happen (Norhridge- that is not the point) it's the "How" it was done given Greg and more recently Jerry held the batton of the Iconic Brand over such a long tenure.
The current CEO has stolen the brand and left structural unemployment of highly skilled engineers in its wake.
Will JBL transducer development continue remains to be seen but in the absence of Greg the continuance of the statement system is unlikely.
We do agree Thomas. All the Government can do is screw things up. Friedman and Hazlitt think so also. I once read a great piece by Mona Charon "If the Government was put in charge of the Sahara in two years there would be a sand shortage and in five years they would run out of sand".Originally posted by Wagner
I thought I was agreeing with you................and I am, when they are truly "free" and not the result of government interference, manipulations and subsidies but rather conducted by the actual parties involved with the creation of the goods
Back to the thread: These yahoos are free to treat Greg and Jerry anyway they choose, but there is a price for everything. They eventually will pay it.
Ed
KEEP ON LISTENING!
If everyone has had their off-topic say in this thread, I'd suggest the Mods perform a clean-up on aisle Another sad day for JBL.
This is, after all, in the Lansing Product Forum/Lansing Product General Information Forum. This thread has degenerated into not even General Audio Discussion but in fact should be in the Non-Audio Forum under "Off Topic".
Please let's get back to our JBL discussion and our new ex-Harman-employee friends.
This is not a rhetorical statement open for debate or snarky reply. Consider it a plea for sanity, if nothing else.
". . . as you have no doubt noticed, no one told the 4345 that it can't work correctly so it does anyway."—Greg Timbers
Okay
Let ask Greg how many no "Tie days" he had during his career at JBL?
OK BMW;
Should we all just line up and say "aint life a bitch!" Boring.
Many of us see this as tragic and are just trying to make sense of the nonsense. Some of us are aquainted with these people and this is upsetting.
If one of them were taken out by a drunk driver do you think we could avoid a discourse on impaired driving?
Barry.
If we knew what the hell we were doing, we wouldn't call it research would we.
Every corporation that creates things needs someone who reads the Wall Street Journal. That is one employee, and not in charge. It seems Harman and by ownership JBL and Revel have not fit this model for decades. When their structure began to resemble an insurance conglomerate, they were lost but fortunately the actual death was a slow motion affair. I can imagine it was not fortunate for all. It can’t be pleasant to work in a death by a thousand cuts situation. On its best day it would be like working on a line with a foreman looking over your shoulder 24/7, admonishing “If you don’t make production, you can be replaced by someone who can.”
In five plus decades of the working life my favorite jobs have involved very small companies that created things or offered services to creative people. My favorite job was fine art level photo reproduction with a concern that had eight employees including the owner and his wife. In my universe once a corporation segues from creating to financial and market manipulation as its primary thrust, it has lost its soul. The corollary is that any company that creates nothing but wealth has no soul to begin with. Making cool stuff cannot be its own reward if you do not make stuff at all.
I do know of one corporation that had a system that worked in both office and goods departments. Honda was founded by a passionate man. In his time at the helm everything they made had an engine so they never left their core reason for existence behind. R & D was autonomous and connected to corporate with only one string. Their budget was a fixed percentage of sales. Think about it. No one looked over their shoulders or meddled with phone calls or meetings with bean counters. If they designed things that were not practical, their budget dropped. Also, their less experienced engineers were sent to work in the racing division, the opposite of their competitors. Another touch, Mr. Honda toured every facility from time to time. Worldwide. He personally met every employee hired since his last visit and planted a tree on the grounds with him. He was the one who coined the term associates, not Walmart, and everyone in the plant wore the same overalls.
As to the future endeavors of engineers late of Harman, I don’t know how many speaker companies in the US aside from Eminence make their own transducers, but there are some who create and sell designs, are small, and don’t try to get rich with each sale. Unfortunately they tend to avoid California. More like Green Bay and St Louis, when it comes to transducers. I think it may be time to bring back kit or build your own cabinet speakers. That would be refreshing after years of unobtainable replacement transducers.
“Hold on to your Vintage products and hope that you can find a way to get parts when things wear out. None of this will involve Harman any longer!”
This quote from Greg does simplify things for owners. We can hopefully reach, without acrimony, consensus on what aftermarket parts are closest to spec and concentrate on helping each other out and being a positive community. It should be easier to be positive having been freed from loyalty to the present and future versions of Harman.
The way to civilize the discourse here could be as simple as writing as if you are face to face with someone instead of on Facebook. Then again, I have been accused of being too nice sometimes. Trusting people to do the right thing and all that.
Information is not Knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom
Too many audiophiles listen with their eyes instead of their ears
No, Wagner is dead wrong in several areas. For example:
"...one could say for example that the gas lines of the Carter years..." is an attempt to inject a certain ideological spin on a situation that existed well before Carter took office in Jan. 1977. The gas shortages actually began during Nixon's last term, before he resigned in August 1974:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisisThe 1973 oil crisis began in October 1973 when the members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC, consisting of the Arab members of OPEC plus Egypt and Syria) proclaimed an oil embargo. By the end of the embargo in March 1974,[1] the price of oil had risen from $3 per barrel to nearly $12 globally; US prices were significantly higher. The oil crisis, or "shock", the embargo caused had many short-term and long-term effects on global politics and the global economy.[2] It was later called the "first oil shock", followed by the 1979 oil crisis, termed the "second oil shock."
I remember waiting in gas lines as a kid in my grandparent's 1960s Pontiac Catalina in upstate NY, but only on the odd or even calendar dates (whatever number their license plate ended with), and it was before anyone outside of Georgia had heard of Jimmy Carter. Here's a chart from the wiki:
Notice that acquisition costs and hence prices at the pump spiked again during Reagan, following the "second oil crisis" of 1979 near the end of Carter's term. It's all in the wiki.
I don't mind someone having a political viewpoint, even if it is not particularly germane to the topic at hand, but don't try to revise history to conveniently fit your spin.
So THAT's why Jerry got laid off
Yes this is how I recall it as well, oil "crisis" starting in the Nixon years. That doesn't mean Nixion had a hand in it either however. Presidents often have less control than we give the office credit for. As far as spin goes, both left and the right do it to sell their ideology. It almost always involves a gross oversimplification of the issue being spun in order to make it sound logical to an electorate eager to justify support for the candidate of their political party. This mindless party politics seems to play heavily on the need for hot button issues and supports the need that people have to belong to something bigger than themselves. I tend to be sensitive to spin because for some strange reason I try to understand both sides of an issue before making up my mind, and even then remain open to new information, sort of like the scientific method is supposed to do (when politics doesn't have it by the balls such as "global warming" for instance). Because of this I am constantly being shot at from both sides, appear to be wishy washy or don't seem to take a strong stance on anything. I am always amazed by how firmly people grip their own beliefs on how the world works. To some, government is always bad and yet it appears some of the best educated, wealthiest and healthiest countries in the world are socialized. Speaking on these lines it isn't too terribly far off before machines, robots, artificial intelligence and what have you are going to be taking everyone's job and then (much to the dismay of right wingers) we'll all be out of work and on public assistance. If a computer can set down an airliner on a runway with a few hundred zillion lines of code it wont be long before some machine can do brain surgery or some robot will care for us in the old folks home. Like Dylan sang, "Oh the times they are a changing" has never been more true.
I hope I haven't crapped on this thread. Just want to say that the reason for these seemingly immoral and idiotic decisions and directions that corporations make are not cut and dried and to oversimplify them is never very accurate.
L200's biamped with 2216Nd1 LF, and 077's added
I don't recall ever seeing Greg (or Jerry either, for that matter) wearing a necktie during my four years at Harman. Perhaps they did when doing dog-and-pony shows for visiting big-shots, but I was never invited to any of those. (Harman wisely kept the cranky tech writer out of public view.)
That's why, in the entire history of the internet, no argument concerning politics has ever been "won" on a message board. Argued endlessly? You bet. But both sides want to win, so neither concedes, and the argument continues. Many message boards ban discussions of politics and religion for this very reason, or have a sandbox forum for the combatants to occupy - out of the main body of the discussion forums. The endless, unyielding arguments breed animosity, dividing the board members who presumably joined the board for a common cause. It never ends, and it never ends well.
Who knows, maybe this board will be the first in history to solve all the world's problems in a peaceful manner. Bets, anyone?
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