Is there something Radio Shack could have done, maybe starting in the early 1970s, that could have left them a market power in consumer electronics to this day? Some kind of mash-up of Apple, Sony, and Best Buy?

In some ways it seems like it could be possible -- they were kind of a player in the early PC market, and they sort of touched 'em all in consumer electronics, a wide variety of stereos and components, phones, intercoms, calculators, CBs, some short wave receivers, and a lot of electronics components and tools.

My memory, though, was that even their high end products were kind of not that good especially for the price. If you were into stereo stuff in the 1980s, you would want other brands first -- Sony, Onkyo, Pioneer, Technics, JBL, Carver, Bose, etc.

Could you have drastically slimmed the product line -- maybe spinning off or killing the electronics components and more technical stuff, dropped some products, and improved the high end? Perhaps with some kind of partnership with a quality but lesser known Japanese manufacturer, especially considering the kind of tech innovation that seemed to come out of the Japan from the 1980s on.

The computer business seemed to kind of stall once MS DOS came out, either because of competition with other clone makers like Compaq or because the Radio Shack systems were sort of tied to CP/M, which got them bogged down in legacy stuff.

I don't know where their products actually came from, I suspect they were mostly contract designs made by someone else which could have limited management's ability to improve products or innovate much. They may have also seen themselves as targeting a very middling section of middle America and didn't think they could or needed to compete with the likes of Sony, etc. Although correcting for inflation, they had a number of stereo components which were priced over $1000 on today's money.

It kind of seemed like they could have endured and become a pretty dominant force somehow, especially given their reach and experience with a broad selection of the consumer electronics market. Especially considering the sort of competition in retail in the era, when a slick dude with a store front could become a player in the local stereo business.