User talk:Dinosawyer/Sandbox/Artronix

I don't have a reference for this, but there was another reason for Artronix financial troubles at the end. Prior to a certain date (I don't recall exactly), the US government was paying for brain scanner installations to encourage spread of the technology. They had some rules but they were pretty generous giving grants. This got expensive, so they started imposing cost-control rules. A cut-off was set at $100K at a time when scanners were running about $1M. This dramatically cut the rate of purchases so many vendors came out with $99K scanners. Artronix tried, but they really didn't cut costs much (not enough research horsepower to really cut costs) and they tried to live on more sales - the old "lose a little bit on each but make it up on the margin". Part of the "margin" was to shift costs to the maint contract, but the scanners were finicky and required recalibrations and other labor-intensive care. This eventually caught up with them. -agk

Shri (talk) 19:11, 5 February 2011 (UTC)