I was bored in traffic earlier and randomly started wondering if companies hold back from releasing the latest and greatest of whatever product they can or could make.
For example if a frame manufacturer managed to find some magic way to reduce the weight of their existing frame by half, would they reduce it by a quarter this year then then the rest next year. Therefore having two years worth of upgrades to make people keep buying new frames. I presume that they base it on the rest of the market. If all frame manufacturers were also reducing the weight then the original company still needs to appear to be the best. But if no one else has found the magic way to reduce the weight is there any point giving away every benefit in one go.
I’m not just thinking bike relates products just products in general.

Any thoughts ?

Andy

I’m sure there’s a lot of new testing that goes into products prior to their release.

While working in the trade specifically holding back ‘advances’ wasn’t something I was aware of: everyone was keen to make as much progress over competitors as possible.

building a better mousetrap…

If you could find a way of halving the weight of a frame without compromising it’s strength you’d have the world beat a path to your door anyway, and you could charge pretty much what ever price you wanted, why would you bother with all the hassle of doing the research and then not developing the best frame you could? Instead market a half good frame….

Wouldn’t have thought so.. why risk losing the competitive advantage if someone else worked it out?

Clearly, yes. Look at the Shimano trickle down. There’s nothing on the new XTR that they couldn’t engineer for cheaper manufacturing and retailing but to maximise the ROI on the new product they release the premium stuff first and then, year on year, they bring out the tech on cheaper stuff. If Shimano Di2 11spd were available on SLX and 105 it wouldn’t be ‘special’ anymore.

Edit: I am thinking of progress in the democratic sense perhaps, rather than the cutting edge.

intentionally, i very much doubt it. through ‘design by committee’ and other **** behaviour, definitely.

Clearly, yes. Look at the Shimano trickle down. There’s nothing on the new XTR that they couldn’t engineer for cheaper manufacturing and retailing but to maximise the ROI on the new product they release the premium stuff first and then, year on year, they bring out the tech on cheaper stuff. If Shimano Di2 11spd were available on SLX and 105 it wouldn’t be ‘special’ anymore

The less cynical way of looking at it is Shimano (or any other manufacturer) want to make te best product they can at any given pricepoint. They also have a limited R&D budget.

year 1) Spend it all on new XTR and relsease it ASAP to get a return on that investment. rder tomake is good as possible they spend every penny available on development and tooling. To the extent you may not even pay shareholers a dividend as it’s all been invested.
Year 2) Spend most of it on XT, pay the shareholders as your R&D investment is now making a profit.
Year 3) Spend most of it on SLX and pay the shareholders
Year 4) ditto deore.
Year 5) repeat year 1.

If they tried to tool up for 4 new groupsets at once they’d have to cut back on the development budget for XTR, and it would still take 4 years to pay back, but it would never be as well developed.

As for holding back an individual technology or not exploiting it, highly unlikley, if you’ve put money into the R&D you want that return NOW, not next year or the year after. The sooner you turn it into profit the sooner you can get on with researching the next big thing. I?ncramental improvements are mostly down to just more development, the final production model is just whatever design was on the board on the last day of the project, given another revision you could make it better but it’s diminishing returns. By starting afresh on a new bike/project the designers get to apply what they’ve learnt and figure out new stuff too, so by the time they get round to the other model again there’s a nice long ‘to do list’ of ideas to incorperate, hence why they can seem to make big strides forward each time.

It’s the difference between engineering the best solution and the real waorld. In the real world after a few weeks/months there so much money been tied up in R&D that even if the next itteration/development would be better/cheaper that incrament is now less than what the company is paying interest (or less than the rate of return would be if they’d not financed it internaly).

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/technology-devolution

Most companies are managed by accountants. As soon as the product is ready they’ll be looking for a return on the R+D costs. Sitting on it is just loosing money.
Plus you need to get it out to gain market share before someone does something clever.

Not the same market, but I am sure Apple are guilty of this!

Hobbling the phone released today so that a new one can be released in a year’s time – yet people lap it up

(PS I do have an Iphone – am not an Apple hater!)

Yes. I can think of an example where a technical clothing company had a reasonably major technical innovation in one of their fabrics but they knew that two of their competitors would be launching similar products in the same season so they sat on it for 6 months and changed their marketing accordingly so as to gain more market share – it seemed to work as it was the only one of the three that’s still around.

it seemed to work as it was the only one of the three that’s still around.

Who is it ?

Canon are guilty of this with there DSLR’s there could create an affordable DSLR that shoots 4K but priced it way beyond most with there 1DC.

Then Panasonic came along and it’s bit them in the arse with the GH4.

I know lots of people who have binned Canon for other manufacturers since.

I think continuous improvement (Japan, Shimano) model is at odds with the “blow them out the water” bit hit of the Western, European & British model — so it’s unlikely that you’d get that huge performance improvement in one go – but it’s not a sales & marketing thing, more of an engineering / development issue..

Canon are guilty of this with there DSLR’s there could create an affordable DSLR that shoots 4K but priced it way beyond most with there 1DC.

Then Panasonic came along and it’s bit them in the arse with the GH4.

Sorry but CMOS and NMOS are two completely different things, you’re comparing apples with oranges. It’s like comparing a reciprocating and a rotary engine, they both perform the same function with the smae fuel but operate in completely different ways. Having been researching the technology (and in particular the fabrication process) that goes into these things I’m not surprised the Canon would be so expensive for the exact same reasons as the Shimano analogy.

Yes, absolutely. One product companies don’t last long. They’re always working a good few generations of product ahead and will release as and when the market demands and any new tech has been developed to a level of maturity that they consider it ready. It takes time to bring a product to market, even for the big companies so by the time they come to market they’re already obsolete relative to the tech the company has in its bag of tricks. Also they will want to maximise the production run after they pass the break even point to maximise profit.

I’m not sure they hold stuff back intentionally, all companies compete against their competitors and any who held back on new technology would just be overtaken. I work for a high tech company and we bring new stuff out as quick as we can, which is never as quick as we or our customers would like….

I’ve worked in hi tech product development for the last 35 years and I’ve never been asked to delay the introduction of something new. Salesmen and women want to sell. New stuff sells. Even if the old stuff is selling fine, something new will sell better.

Not the same market, but I am sure Apple are guilty of this!

Hobbling the phone released today so that a new one can be released in a year’s time – yet people lap it up

(PS I do have an Iphone – am not an Apple hater!)
Yet you believe the rubbish put out by those that are?
If you knew anything at all about computer development, particularly memory capacity and processor power, you’d know instinctively that your statement is bollocks.
I cite Moore’s Law: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

“Moore’s law” is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The observation is named after Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of the Intel Corporation, who first described the trend in a 1965 paper[1][2][2][3] and formulated its current statement in 1975. His prediction has proven to be accurate, in part because the law now is used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.[4] The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore’s law: quality-adjusted microprocessor prices,[5] memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.[6] All of these are improving at roughly exponential rates as well.

This exponential improvement has dramatically enhanced the effect of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.[7] Moore’s law describes a driving force of technological and social change, productivity, and economic growth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.[8][9][10][11]

You say that but NVIDIA are 100% doing that right now with their current crop of GPUs.

The 960 comes with 2GB of memory… 2GB! That’s tiny. There is only two reasons it doesn’t have 4GB:

1: AMD have a really damaged reputation in the GPU market right now, and they have no “current gen” comparable product.

2: The 970 has 4GB, but also costs £100 more. They want you to buy that one.

How ever the 960 is the sweetspot price point at £150 – its the price a lot of people buy at. They want these same people to buy again in two years time, so they limit the memory to 2GB as there is little competition right now.

/tinfoil

intentionally, i very much doubt it. through ‘design by committee’ and other **** behaviour, definitely.

Theres that. But also the market is paradoxically both wanting something new (we have a front page that drips with new stuff every day for use to say ‘want’ to) and at the same time resistant to change. A buyer wants their new bike to be in some way newer than their old bike and to do that it has to be different to their old bike – but at the same time decries every innovation as ridiculous or superficial, so it also has to be reassuringly the same.

Theres no technology available now to make 11spd group sets that wasn’t available when we had 7spd group sets and no principle that would have prevented as transition straight from 7 to 11 other than the customer would have to be dragged screaming, just as they had to be dragged screaming to disk brakes, or aluminium frames – we’ve only got from there to here in baby steps because with every change the customers throw their dummy out the pram…. and then buy it.

The passing of 26″ is a case in point. For all the gnashing of teeth from about the pointlessness of 650b when it comes to buying a new bike – people bought 650b. Brands like Cotic that have ‘listened to the customer’ and stuck with 26″ have sold…. 650b bikes. “At the current level of sales compared to the 27.5 Soul and 29 Solaris we can’t justify another batch of Soul26.” – they listened to the customer and the customer **** them over – even as one of the few places that still sell a 26 the can’t sell one batch a year. Its dangerous to listen to your customers – people over report their virtue.

When ever ‘the industry’ is criticised for foisting change on the customer the reality is the industry is able to discern the difference between what buyers say and what they actually do.

I can think of companies that do phased introduction of new tech but not any that can be seen to deliberately hold stuff back.

The obvious one is VAG. They’ll gradually introduce new platforms and engines over their 4 brands so as not to steal sales off each other. For example they released the Up!, then the Mii then the CitiGo which are all essentially all the same cars but they would have shot themselves in the foot if they’d released the Up! to critical acclaim then introduced the CitiGo immediately after for less. The Up! had a waiting list and when that fell to normal levels the Mii came out. Then they released the CitiGo and that had waiting lists due to the keen price point. Maximises sales and profits.

What has been mentioned above about the companies being a few steps ahead on development of what they release is very true in some industries. If you’ve got a few ideas ready to hit market in your back pocket then you can react to your competitors releasing new stuff. Take Shimano’s clutch mechs and SRAM’s Type 2’s. One came out to a media storm (Shimano first?) and the other was released very quickly afterwards. If there were 4 or 5 companies in the market then it doesn’t work to delay stuff hitting market but when you’ve only got 2 big players like in drivetrain then you can afford to have stuff ready to go but continue to develop it so that it’s ready to launch but still improving it at the same time. It sounds the same as holding tech back but it’s not as you can release V1 and V2 etc or delay launch by a few weeks to steal the thunder from your competitor. All’s fair in love and war (and business).

My answer is – depends.

If the company concerned has market dominance, the new product would cannibalise their current product range, and there’s no wiff of the competition coming out with something similar, then its a viable (but risky – see example below) strategy.

If however, the new product could potentially grow their market share, and if they don’t launch it fast someone else will, then they’ll want to get it out there as fast as possible.

Example of the former was IBM in the eighties. They dominated the computer market with their mainframes, but their developers invented this weird new thing called a mini-computer. Not wanting to jeopardise their highly lucrative mainframe business and all the proprietary software and peripherals business that went along with it, they sat on the invention for a number of years. Unfortunately that allowed DEC to gain a foothold and steal the title of inventor of the mini-computer, and the mainframe market was never the same again anyway. That’s the risk – if you sit on a new development, others may launch it instead. A decade or so later IBM were determined not to make the same mistake with the microcomputer (PC to the rest of us) – and the rest is history…

I know that’s a bit of an old example, but I worked for IBM back then so have personal experience of it.

I depends how much the company wants to ‘polish’ things. You often get to 80% of the functionality/performance very quickly, that extra 20% can be a very long haul as that is where the accountants or designers or managers like to get their oar in.

Gillete invented stainless steel razors years before their competitor but sat on them as they were making a fortune on replacements.

when a competitor fianlly thought of/released teh same idea, Gillette were there immeidatley with a new product.

this was ~100years ago mind

In my industry the opposite is true. The products (chemical ingredients) are perfectly effective and safe as they are, however there is a continuous improvement mentality to make it harder for new entrants to match the offerings.

Particularly in regulated areas, where for example going to the FDA and saying ‘I know impurity x is allowed at 0.002% but our process capability allows us to make it to 0.001% – why don’t we change the monograph to reflect it’ – is very hard to turn down despite having no material benefit.

It’s easy to dress up as making the products better for the consumer in the end, in reality it’s like trying to jump on a train that’s leaving the station. You have to sprint like hell to make sure you get on it early, if you just run up to it matching the speed of the train, then you find the train’s also speeding up to a point where you can’t get on. Being on the train is like already supplying; you’re getting paid for everything you make and every batch you make, you get a bit better at making it.