Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

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This whole saga pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine/recipe. The overlap of people who like to tinker with this stuff and people who love the chalk seems big enough.

It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. At least it seemed like that. My guess is that they could have sold one of the machines to a US based entrepreneur. I can pretty much envision somone making that chalk in a garage and selling it to universities/individuals.

I also think that it's somewhat short sighted to assume procurement by the employer is needed. Especially in "brainy" jobs it's pretty common for people to be willing to spend their own money for tools they use on the job. If my school only provides chalk X I'm pretty much willing to spend some of my own money for the better chalk if I can't change their mind.

Maybe they were just "too big" and targeting a commodity market instead of going for the smaller premium market.

> 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 can't work" – well, duh).

There is a cultural element -- the Japanese perceive the cultural contrast between their world and "ours" more acutely than we do, in both directions (i.e. their positions go from "the West is much better than us" to "the West is so much worse than us" very quickly, it's hard to find level-headed assessments of both positions). Most of the "obviously it can't work" sentiment actually comes from there, in many cases.

And then there is an economic issue: their currency has been so strong for so long, it simply wasn't worth for most medium-to-small companies to invest in tricky oversea expansion for a very long time. Things have changed a bit there, but the cultural perception has not shifted much.

There is also the obvious difficulty of limited chances for local expansion: the country closest to them in cultural terms are Korea, which they historically see as inferior and poorer, and China, which they know they simply cannot match on equal terms.

And then, of course, there is the recent history of train-crash expansion in the '80s. That didn't end well, and some of the lessons they learnt was not to try too hard to expand abroad.

> There is also the obvious difficulty of limited chances for local expansion: the country closest to them in cultural terms are Korea, which they historically see as inferior and poorer, and China, which they know they simply cannot match on equal terms.

I'm not so sure about this analysis.

Korea is a much smaller market than Japan and also has regulations hostile foreign products in general (high import tariffs and so on) or to Japanese products in particular (such as limitations on how much Japanese-language material can be broadcast). I don't know what it means to say that they "simply cannot match China on equal terms;" it's only recently that Japan's economy's size was surpassed by that of China and even then it has a number of advantages that China does not (much higher per-capita income, a more stable regulatory environment, lower levels of corruption, etc., you get the idea).

This is the historical perspective I was talking about, but I'll just note that your points are not orthogonal to mine. The end result is that post-crash, Japanese companies have been very reluctant to expand, either close-by or far away.

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.

I don't buy that (outside of copyright licensing). Especially for anything cloud based. As a Canadian, we don't have a choice but to expand to include the US early on (since it's a market 10x bigger) and I've not really seen that become a stumbling block.

Because you don't have a choice, you faced the related issues right away and found them not a big deal. Most US businesses do have a choice to just ignore these issues completely, because their internal market is big enough to sustain expansion for a long time.

(although when it comes to audio-video, @navait is correct: it's a legal minefield.)

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

> 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 that many Japanese companies are simply not interested in selling their goods internationally, because they don't need to. They can make plenty of money without dealing with the complications of selling their products in other countries. Many are small businesses and are content with making enough money to cover payroll.

Same in Germany. And the reason why so many smaller German companies existed in pretty much the same way for the past millenium.

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?

That's very true. Fuji is notorious for this - they build fantastic cameras/lenses but until recently there was little advertising and they were difficult to source outside Japan. They're also very bad at keeping US customers in the loop about their supply issues.

Japan has a huge economy and market, much like the US, which also exhibits similar insularity.

I really enjoyed the bit in the crash bandicoot blog that was posted recently where the author mentioned how the Japenese execs from Sony were completely against bringing crash to Japan. They tweaked the looks of the character slightly and the execs bought in right away.

US demand and overseas markets can't cancel out Supply and Demand and market forces.

- Chalk is on it's way out. It's a rapidly shrinking market. Each year there will be less customers and less profit world wide.

- He could have sold the machine to another entreprenuer? Their company makes 45 MILLION sticks of chalk. They're getting their materials at a high bulk discount. Another company can never match the price point. They'll end up selling the same chalk at double the price.

- And expansion into the USA is laughable. Try expanding into an existing market with well established players (crayola) that is shrinking and on its way out.

- And this is the USA we're talking about, we prefer cheap products to quality ones. The only time it seems we invest in premium products is when they are an American brand, made in America.

> Chalk is on it's way out. It's a rapidly shrinking market.

I am a math professor. Most of us prefer chalk, and have no desire to go to whiteboards, smart boards, Powerpoints, what have you. I think that there is a fairly durable market for chalk.

Moreover, over the last five years I think that awareness of Hagoromo (and more generally, of high-end chalk) has been growing. You see it for the first time when visiting some other university and think "Wow, what is this? I must have some!" This led me to buy several boxes of it at $35 a pop. My out-of-town guests, who give lectures in the research seminar I help to run, get treated to the good stuff.

As a student, I preferred chalkboards to whiteboards because they were easier to read. It seems that most of the time, unless the professor had an exceptionally well working dry-erase marker, the lines were too thin and light for me to read them, no matter the color.

I remember thinking that the whiteboards were an improvement at first, but that quickly changed when I realized I couldn't read what was written on them anymore.

And the dry-erase boards are never cleaned properly, leaving them coated with a weirdly-colored scrunge.

Unfortunately there simply aren't very many math professors. An average American school district has 200 teachers, all of whom would have used chalk until recently, that's a lot more than there are professors in a university math department and there are many more school districts than universities.

I agree that there is a durable market for chalk, but not at this kind of volume.

It'd qualify as a lifestyle business if you were just looking to make $50-60k USD/year.

You're treating it like a commodity product focused on economies of scale (comparison to Crayola). As an outsider reading about it the last couple of weeks they did have good quantities but it feels like a repositioning as a quality leader makes sense. So switch the focus from cost leadership to differentiation (quality) in Porter terms.

I'm pretty sure the customers mentioned qualify as typical customers that are willing to pay a hefty premium for a product they love. tl;dr: scale down, focus on quality, charge more > shutdown

Oh yeah? try drawing 3D painting on the street with marker.

pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine/recipe.

A recent example: Nitram fine art charcoal.

http://www.nitramcharcoal.com

Grandson of founder sells business, gear, and secret recipe to enthusiastic customer, who relaunches a beloved product line.

http://www.nitramcharcoal.com/blog/the-history-of-nitram-cha...

Obsolete technologies become forms of art. Vinyl records, polaroid pictures, book making, knitting, etc.

Film, also.

The Impossible Project is truly impressive. Polaroid film is a mindblowingly complex product to develop, since it's basically a photo lab sandwiched into a thin sheet. Even if their results aren't perfect, it's amazing they're making it work at all.

There's also a small group of people who are rebooting the Ferriana film line.

    There's also a small group of people who
    are rebooting the Ferriana film line.

In typical Kickstarter fashion, yes maybe, if we're lucky and they don't run out of cash first. They just sent out an update yesterday saying that the hardware they thought would satisfy their needs won't do anything of the sort, and that they're now months behind on their schedule.

I hope to, at some point, receive my rolls of 135 and 120 film, but I'm not holding my breath.

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

It depends on who you talk to, I've seen renovated university study spaces with fresh chalkboards. When I asked the staff why they chose chalkboards instead of whiteboards, they said that it's cheaper in the long run because cleaning and replacing whiteboards is awful and expensive. Chalkboards are significantly more durable.

Not to mention I've never had a piece of chalk dry out.

Seems whenever I try to use a whiteboard, the first 5 markers I try don't write and I have to spend 15 minutes hunting for spares.

And if you have a "sort of working" marker, which is what I'd usually end up with, it won't write very dark and the whiteboard text has worse contrast than a chalkboard.

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

can't you just drip alcohol into the dry ones to get them back to working condition?

That's why I don't throw them away--never know if there is a coworker who collects the dry ones and restores them. <s>

Not indefinitely, no.

Which themselves are being, albeit slowly, replaced by mobile technology, surface-type screens, computers attached to projectors, etc. I imagine the market for chalk are all die-hards, like say, vinyl record enthusiasts today. If you were to use internet outrage as your own metric you'd think it was a huge market. Its not.

Chalk is two generations behind at this point. Its probably not too great to be breathing in all day either, at least for some of the population:

The study, published in the journal Indoor and Built Environment, ruefully concludes: "Though real-time airborne chalk dust generation was found to be low in this study … and did not contain toxic materials, chalk dust could be harmful to allergic persons and may cause lacrimation and breathing troubles in the long run and certainly is a constant nuisance in classrooms as it may soil clothes, body parts, audiovisual aids and study materials."

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/nov/28/chalk-dust-...

surface-type screens, computers attached to projectors, etc

These have their place, certainly, but I'd find it hard to believe that power-consuming electronic replacements (also considering the environmental impact from raw materials and waste products, and energy used to manufacture them) are a "better" choice than a chalkboard in many cases.

Power is also required to mine chalk (giant limestone mines), process it, package it, ship it, etc and its completely non-renewable. It becomes dust and then you place another order.

A PC with a projector can last a decade in use and depending on the region may be powered by mostly or all renewables.

One of the interesting notes in the article is that they apparently use a lot of oyster shells. I would assume the shells are typically a waste product in other (likely food) industry processes. That's pretty darn green. Besides, we have a lot of limestone, veritable rock-oceans of it.

That's part of why it's incredibly difficult to talk about waste on industrial scales. One plant's garbage is frequently another's input. Waste is expensive, so plants will always try to reduce it to the bare minimums, and if possible make money off it, in the case of certainl classes of recyclables.

>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 willing to bet a computer is the equivalent of hundreds of years worth of a blackboard with chalk.

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.

Sure but that one time cost has a 10 year depreciation. A lifetime of chalk is endless mining because you go through it so quickly. You're constantly buying chalk. You're not constantly buying projectors.

>that I'm willing to bet a computer is the equivalent of hundreds of years worth of a blackboard with chalk.

As someone who grew up near a limestone mine, I think you greatly underestimate how much work it takes to get rocks from the earth. I've seen some of the largest machines in the world working there. Its an huge operation.

Lots of people have respiratory reactions to dry erase markers too.

>> 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.

> they could have sold one of the machines to a 'XXXX' based entrepreneur.

I hope this entrepreneur have a handy geiger counter next him/her when buying those machines. Just in case... better safe than sorry

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