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Is The 6-Month Product Cycle Upon Us?
Mark Goldstein writes "What is perhaps more interesting than the 4 new Konica Minolta cameras announced today is the rapid product cycle that seems to have been established by both Konica Minolta and other manufacturers." Rather than the yearly model updates that people have come to expect, the article notes that three members of this batch aren't even a year old, and one is only six months.
ever checked car radio systems ?
models also change a lot and quite fast, while just the looks which have changed while the features are almost the same..
at least usually external cd-changers stay the compatible but if you have a changer of 2-3 years old it can be quite a task to find out with which current radio it still works (as I found out recently)
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On the contrary, it's particularly an Asian thing, both in electronics and in cars. The Japanese auto makers change things at the part level much more frequently than the Americans do, for example.
It seems like a lot of British and Europeans forget how much more connected the US economy is to East Asia than theirs are.
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It plays havoc with people wanting a linux compatible Wifi card as well. Basically no wifi manufacturer has released a card that at one stage had say a nice prism or orinoco chipset in it that hasn't changed it for something uncompatible like a Broadcomm or TI.
eg:
Netgear WG311 was an Atheros supported by the madwifi driver but is now a Texus Intruments which is yet to have a stable driver (partial success has been had with this one, just not by me). At *least* Netgear had the kindness to call the TI version "WG311v2" and change the box slightly (documented here it still makes it really annoying when you see "supported" next to "wg311" at places such as here, then you buy one and find out it's changed from 4 weeks ago)
The (in)famous Linksys WMP11 used to be a linux-friendly prism but is now a Broadcomm or inprocomm (I think it's been both according to The List
Many other wifi cards have undergone such massive (I consider a chipset change massive) changes without there model numbers changed and it makes getting a wireless card for linux *VERY* difficult and frustrating.
Nokia expects to "launch" 35 new models this year. Thirty-five! And that's down from a projection of 40. Launching them 5 at a time as Nokia does, that means that their "product cycle" is less than 2 months.. And I still happen across shops that happen to have the phone I owned 5 year ago sitting quietly on the shelf, still unused in its original wrappings.
And they all do the same job. Whilst there's no shortage of potentially substantial features to be added, you can count the number of phones that support for example 3G on the fingers of 1 hand. The rest send text-messages, dial and play a game or two.
In truth, nobody needs all those new features. Bluetooth is very handy, and GPRS is nice for data (until 3G comes along), but you can already get all of that in last year's boring businessman-model.
These new models are all basically the same, or rather, based on only a few underlying hardware platforms. Obviously the N-Gage is different from your average teenager's phone or a smartphone, but within each type the variation is both endless and pitifully trivial.
Motorola was a master at this, they even kept older models in production by placing the new hardware with dumbed-down software in the older shell, adding a weight to keep the handset weighing as much as the old model(!).
The same is of course true of Digital Cameras. Each new model only replaces the CCD with a few more megapixels, or adds some software feature, perhaps changes the shell to something less plasticcy looking. The Olympus range is a good example. Or IIRC the Canon 10D which can be made to do almost all of the 1D's tricks, except take more pictures per second (due to RAM speed/amount apparently).
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