If you can sell a $100 miner to the public for $500 why not? Then you can take the $500 in revenue and buy 5 of your own in-house miners and the net result would be 6 units added to the network at the cost of 1 to the miner company. The miner company would get 500% the hash/$ as you do and have minimal downside with increasing difficulty.
If they didn't have plans to do so now they do

Lol, that's the business model they used to
fund their companies. Now they don't have to deal with all of the hassles of retail sales.
I'm guessing that they just prefer not do deal with the public for the marginal profit from selling 1000 miners when they can just build them by the container-load for themselves and other large operations.
Sure, it goes against everything bitcoin was founded on. But there's nothing we can do to stop this freight train now. It's just going to run us over before it crashes at the end of the line all while slowly destroying bitcoin in the process.
Agreed 100%. BFL is sitting on much "free" money from the first ASIC generation, it doesn't matter how bad they make the second gen, they still win with this business model.
And to think that Yifu decided to design the Avalon because he was worried that BFL represented a threat to the future of Bitcoin by monopolizing production of mining equipment.
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/3203/avalon-ships-bitcoins-first-consumer-asics/yeah but that time has soooo past.
builders have reached the point that we the miner are pretty much completely superfluous.. most small guys can do 3-5k watts in a private home 1-2k watts in an apartment.
I can't even buy enough gear to mine 1 bitcoin a day if I run in house. in the dead of the winter I could run 2 sp31's which would be 5.5kwatts and 11th if this gear was in my hands now it would mine .23 btc a day.
I do agree they build 4 sell one to pay for all 4 and mine with 3. I am saying they are stupid to do so they should freeze all sales and just mine for about 50 days or 75 days do no growth or under 5% growth again and again.. The sell one and mine with 3 is growing the network at a speed that does not help them. It is also hurting btc price quite a bit.
As they have to sell btc off and they sell it cheaply. Since none of them will mine and hold the coin.