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Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

asia.nikkei.com

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Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#101

Post by bsder »

throw7 wrote: post #38
a5seo wrote: post #35

About 20 years ago they should have created a grading standard for chalk so they could have avoided their commoditization, or at least only compete with others at similar quality (and presumably margins). Similar to organic standards.

Yes, this is what I wanted to say. Quantify what makes them great. After reading the article and the comments, I still have no understanding of why or what makes them so great.

Thicker sticks. Coating on the outside of the chalk. Different formulation to make it smoother and less dusty.

Basically, the chalk seems to be optimized for writing Kanji strokes which need to vary in thickness and weight.

And, yes, he did miss the boat in the US. I have never heard of this stuff before they went under (not completely true: my Japanese teacher complained about the quality of American chalk all the time--I should have twigged in). I would have bought crates of this stuff when I was teaching.

Hopefully the Korean company he sold the machines to won't be quite so insular.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#102

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

ars wrote: post #82
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean to say that it wasn't possible, you probably don't need a subjective measure of quality. I think you could empirically discover some objective characteristics of good chalk that would do the trick. You could at least quickly reject the worst chalk which is too brittle and too hard. I meant to say that there was and is no way that is recognized sufficiently universally that enables one to specify a chalk…

Specify bending strength, the chalk must not snap under specified force. Next define a writing pressure, angle and stroke speed and require fewer than x blank areas in the line. Require that the line width be within a specific tolerance, not too thick not too thin. Maybe a spec like this doesn't exist now, but you could use the good chalk and write the spec based on how it did.

The trouble is that the places that sell chalk to universities don't rate chalk like this. Like I said in another post ITT, we derped around for a couple years before we just gave up and installed the damn whiteboards.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#103

Post by oldmanjay »

rthomas6 wrote: post #54
putchdes wrote: post #52

When he said that people sent a flood of faxes, it made me totally cool with no more chalk. When your customers are still sending faxes, that pretty much sums up your dire situation.

It's Japan though. Faxes in Japan aren't antiquated like in the USA.

The entire technology is antiquated. It doesn't matter how much shiny you wrap around it.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#104

Post by panjaro »

putchdes wrote: post #52

When he said that people sent a flood of faxes, it made me totally cool with no more chalk. When your customers are still sending faxes, that pretty much sums up your dire situation.

And some people just don't have appreciation for business which value quality, culture, ethics and respect for employees. They are busy with their own arrogance.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#105

Post by rmc »

navait wrote: post #51
rmc wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's common amoung US companies as well. How many tech companies aren't available in !USA? How much "streaming TV shows" aren't available in !USA?

90% of those are legal issues, whether it be in the US or in the country they are expanding to, especially in the case of copyrighted media.

Amazon's European headquarters, and AWS cloud is in Ireland. There's no amazon.ie. I had to use amazon.co.uk.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#106

Post by rmc »

twblalock wrote: post #77
creshal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most don't even care about overseas expansion, and if they do, it's poorly executed (say, Daihatsu, who dicked around on the European market for decades without ever listening to even trivial customer wishes, and then wrote the whole business off because it "obviously…

> I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most don't even care about overseas expansion, and if they do, it's poorly executed (say, Daihatsu, who dicked around on the European market for decades without ever listening to even trivial customer wishes, and then wrote the whole business off because it "obviously can't work" – well, duh). The Japanese domestic consumer market is so enormous t…

I presume that US companies would also have this effect. US domestic market is very large, so why bother expanding to (say) UK which is ~15% the size?

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#107

Post by cpwright »

phkahler wrote: post #45
hahamrfunnyguy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems the preference is shifting towards dry-erase boards.

>> It seems the preference is shifting towards dry-erase boards. I'm not letting my daughter write on the driveway with markers ;-)

But the quality of chalk for your driveway doesn't need to be that high; and there big and lots of colors probably matters most.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#108

Post by lsaferite »

mcphage wrote: post #79
ansible wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What drives me up a wall is when people find a non-working marker... and then put it back! No! Throw it away! It is better to have no markers than have non-working ones. That is an easy and clear signal that it is time to find / buy more markers.

> when people find a non-working marker... and then put it back! No! Throw it away! I trained myself to, whenever I found a non-working whiteboard marker, literally throw it into a back corner to pick up later. Similarly, when I take off a sock with holes, I tear the hole a lot bigger so I don't feel tempted to keep it in use.

Hah, my wife looks at me funny when I suddenly rip apart a sock or pair of underwear. :O

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#109

Post by HCIdivision17 »

Panoramix wrote: post #95
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Besides, we have a lot of limestone, veritable rock-oceans of it. Sure but the amount of carbon you burn to get to that rock, excavate it, process it, move it, etc, etc is non-trivial. A computer and projector on 8 hours of day is a drop in a bucket to that.

Yeah but in order to manufacture that computer and projector you needed vast amounts of energy, water, minerals, plastics, rare earths, compounds that don't exist naturally in our planet, pollution disposal, such as heavy metal contamination & arsenic compounds, waste acid, strong bases. In fact the cost things like PECVD or dry etching is so disproportionate compared to drilling a hole in the ground, that I'm willin…

Exactly. Having worked on vacuum systems for physical vapor deposition, I can assure you that there's an enormous amount of energy going into gently wafting the materials onto other materials. (The wide area glass coater I worked on had a 2MW substation running dozens of 150-200kW power supplies (not full tilt all at once, obviously).)

Really, I recommend anyone look into this stuff. Just to get silicon to the purity and precise structure to just start chip fabrication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_process Imagine the whole supply chain, from smelting metal for wires and cases to plastic molding to storage, economies of scale truly are vast.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#110

Post by rthomas6 »

oldmanjay wrote: post #103
rthomas6 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Japan though. Faxes in Japan aren't antiquated like in the USA.

The entire technology is antiquated. It doesn't matter how much shiny you wrap around it.

What I meant was that fax machines are still in widespread use by all demographics in Japan, so getting a lot of faxes doesn't indicate much about the age or aversion to progress of the senders.
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