I enjoyed that. I disagree with some of the suggestions in there, RCA went to PCB's early (so did Philco, who went even earlier), and the reliability of their products markedly suffered for it. As I mentioned in a parallel article, it's not uncommon to find older (60's era) Zenith electronics that still work as new from the box. Zenith waited until the mainstream use of transistors to move to PCB's because it solved the primary issue of PCB's - heat. There (still) is no reliable way to put tubes on a PCB and have it last, and this was particularly true for television applications one, because of the amount of heat generated by particular tubes used for certain aspects of TV design, and because of the sheer number of them. Zenith went to PCB's for the Transistorized sections and kept point to point wiring for the tube portions in hybrid sets. It's part of why they had a good reputation for quality - one that persists today.

Interestingly enough, there is still a small rump of Zenith humming along in Illinois, mostly doing R&D and Technology Licensing. LG owns them now, I've often wondered if LG ever introduced US Television production, if they'd do it under the Zenith brand name.

https://zenith.com

The article was published in 1988, before Zenith decided to sell the PC business (a very successful unit, as the article indicates), rather than exit the TV business.

Lots of wrong bets out there in time - notably, look at AT&T, they held on to Western and Long Lines, they probably should have divested those and held onto the RBOC's