Re: How come I can\'t see the A2 at the SF site?
Thanks for clarifying that McGizmo and Derek.
Let me clarify my view too: when a business fails to meet demand it loses revenue. This may of course not always be bad for business, and I'm not suggesting that it is for SF. Increasing supply to meet demand means a number of tradeoffs have to be made. One of these deals with the marginal cost for every added batch, taking into account the needed capacity investments, etc, in relation to the expected income. On the other hand, a well known problem for manufacturers is that high initial demand, arising from the novelty of the product, being first-to-market, having superior quality or features, etc, cannot be met due to ramp-up problems in production, bad foresight, etc, and that when capacity finally increases, other factors have come into play and as a result demand has fallen. Just look at the mobile phone maker (Sony) Ericsson, who have been notoriously unsuccessful in this regard. Their new phones are always out of stock. Naturally, consumers take their business elsewhere. In this particular case they mainly take it to Nokia and Samsung, which is fine with me because they are both superior companies.
SF may of course feel safe in their market leading position, especially seeing as they have little competition across large parts of their product range. This fact, coupled with what seems like a healthy dose of secure government contracts are of course the envy of any manufacturer. But as every management book says on page one: we live in a "fiercely competitive" and "rapidly changing" world. And so does SF. It would bother me to see a company like SureFire resting on its laurels while others start copying their products. I hope they realize that entry barriers would be low. There are hundreds of workshops ready to sell time on the most sophisticated multi-axes CNC machines. And wouldn't it be ironic if the real SF challenge one day comes out of China, a country whose production capabilities the SF catalogue ridicules? It may happen, and is indeed happening to hundreds of businesses as we speak.
One way of preventing this is to grow organically. And what better way to do this than target all the "ordinary" people who are stuck with no-name, unreliable and underperforming flashlights, but who would want something better and be prepared to pay for it?
I guess the question I'm interested in here is this: does SF consider the aforementioned situation to be a problem or not? Or in other words, what's the priority of individual customers vs the Army, the Police, etc?
I'm not suggesting that individual customers are not important to SureFire. Hopefully they are, although some dealers I've talked to have suggested the opposite.
I'm just speculating here that demand from government agencies, the Military, the Police, etc, outweigh demand by individual customers by so much that there's simply no economy in catering to these individual customers and dealers?
If this is the case, SF could put an end to at least some of the speculations and disappointments by letting us know.
As much as I doubt that they will, I hope that, at some point, SF will begin to understand that this approach might, I say might, not be the best way to realize the full potential of their business, which I think is great in all other aspects than this.
Also, what I've said does not necessarily apply to the CPF community where there will always be people willing to wait for the newest SureFire light, no matter what.
