For us US folks, Amazon.jp will send you the unobtanium Makita tools you know you want.... like the Makita battery-operated microwave.

Shout out to TTI for keeping Ryobi cheap, cheerful, and a good value. Not my cup of tea, but their stuff is reasonably fine for the price.

Not sure where “Who Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee?” in the title came from.

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Same with all consumer white goods electronics: microwave ovens, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, etc. most white label by a few conglomerates with the same Chinese factories.

The "high quality ones" that have their own R&D and manufacturing, are very expensive and out of reach for a lot of people.

The bottom line is that you can also compete by investing in quality.

I don’t know if it’s by LLM generation or just contemporary style, but I find the style of omitting the subject from sentence after sentence after sentence unreadable. Once is fine. Six in a row is insufferable.

Tangentially, Arrow T50 stapler used to be a tank but now it's wet shit. Apparently they changed to a new factory.

So when your reputation is big you can slack on the product. Or is that naive? Is it the natural progression for all products?

Like in that movie Brasil. The food is awful but the illustration of the food is wonderful.

Good example of what Private Equity did and doing to many industries. I also notice once a PE Firm takes over a Company, kiss quality good bye.

They mentioned Eye Wear is next, I think the author can guess where that is going. No reason to doubt the same will happen to that industry too.

I recently decided I will go for the cheap Chinese store brand power tools for most things. It's about 1/5 to 1/3 the price of Ryobi, gets really good reviews, have been sold for more than 10 years now with the same batteries, and comes with a 5 year warranty which is 2 years more than ryobi. It's maybe not going to last 10 years, but at 1/5 the price it does not have to.

> Ryobi handles DIY at Home Depot. Milwaukee handles pros. The two brands don't eat each other. They serve different people at different price points with different expectations

So market fit is driving both worse and better products at the same time. Cheap DIYers like me are buying the cheapest stuff we can find, and complaining that it's as cheap as its price. My neighbor the contractor buys the expensive stuff and finds that the quality at least somewhat reflects that.

Worse on purpose is my fault, because I'm the guy who bought a cheap Ryobi saw, instead of none at all. Plane flights are worse because I'm the guy who buys the cheapest ticket and tolerates the resulting discomforts, instead of staying home. You can see that through the lens of greed and exploitation, or as just a market evolving to supply consumer demand.

Snap-on stays winning

> The pattern

> This isn't a tools story.

> The names change. The industries change. The strategy doesn’t.

The pattern

This isn't an insightful blog.

The names change. The topics change. The slop doesn’t.

FWIW these worseonpurpose articles have been popping up regularly, consistently accused of being slop, and the purported author has been called out as a Palantir AI shill. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779481

[delayed]

The big thing that happened to power tools was Lithium-Ion batteries. All of these companies competed when they were still corded electric tools. You could just make a really good drill or saw or router.

Interchangeable batteries got really good and made every set of tools a platform. More importantly, there are only a handful of sources to get batteries from. For all these companies to differentiate and compete they needed to insert their products into wide lines of platforms.

>These companies prove the same thing from the opposite direction. You don't have to get acquired. You don't have to take the PE money. You can just keep making good products and telling everyone else to go to hell. It's harder, and it's slower, and the growth chart won't impress a Wall Street analyst. But the tools last. And the brand means something 50 years from now instead of ending up in a clearance bin.

How can we convince business owners to take this path? It seems in a future everything will be owned by a few megacorps and crappyfied.

FTA : The tool companies that are still good. Klein, Makita, Knipex, Channellock, Hilti, Bosch.