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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.
Yeah, sure. The picture quality'll go up, but the overall quality go down, just like video games, or processors, or....
All show and no substance...
I mean that's what seems to be happening with these rapid production cycles; they concentrate so much on improving one aspect that the entire product suffers, or at least starts to suffer, from it.
And let's not forget our favorite one, Microsoft; Although I'm sure this is not the main reason M$ sucks... *Insert M$ bashing here* *and here*
*and here*
*and a little more here...*
"Curiouser and Curiouser" - Alice
Can the six month job cycle be far behind?
I think it is great to put out new products when ever they are ready. I don't feel compeled to always have the newest model, because I know that even with a 1 year product cycle, I will always end up the loser (money-wise) that way.
The six month turn around just means that when I do need to buy a product it is more likely that it will be a time of year when I will be buying a realitively new product.
I think this is a good thing (unless this turns out to be too little time for testing).
Of course, this plays havoc with review readers, since by the time a product is reviewed, a new batch of products is out...
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
This is why I hate cell phones.
I just want a phone, I don't want to pay for new features I don't need in a new phone in 6 months after my current phone falls apart because they made a piece of crap.
It has been for a while then. Unless nobody seem to notice that the video card market has been in a 6 month product cycle for a long time now.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Have we? I'm more surprised that anyone expected model updates once a year. I expect them whenever the manufacturer believes that bringing out a new model is economically viable. I certainly don't see a new model 6 months after the last one as being particularly noteworthy.
Is this just an American thing? I mean, the rest of the world has never had things like cars being different from one year to the next, yet in the US, you seem to have a new version of each car model each year, being arbitrarily different to the last, apparently just for the sake of being different and new for that particular year.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
i don't know about you guys, but my old motorola brick was less laggy and had better sound (i know... digital is better) than my brand new siemens.
they are not caring about quality anymore.
Markets that are in periods of rapid change obviously have rapid product cycles. When the race to the bottom is finished, and the winners have divided up the market, the product cycle will slow down again.
There are still too many camera manufacturers and the costs are still too high. The market will slow down when the cost per camera has come down to around $20 and the functionality is more than the average consumer wants. There will always be a market for premium products but this is not what is driving the current cycle: it's the mass market.
Standard technology curve... aka Heironymous' Law.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
The problem is that shorter release cycles are not necessarily better for the consumers. For the average consumer, it's hard enough to choose a brand amongst the myriad models out there. Then the buyer can look forward to having their model devalued with a new upgrade.
The manufacturers, will also lose out as they end up haemmoraging their own profits by reducing the return on research investments as well as losing the opportunity to build up a brand like Apple did with their iPod.
This pattern put a lot of people off JBuilder and Borland products in general. In the long run its probably done them more harm than good.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Welcome to Slashdot, where we debate the commonplace if we can't find a better way to work in an advertisement.
Seems they finally figured out Dogbert's release system. In order to make more money, you need to make more products, and release them more frequently. Also it doesn't account for any crappiness in the product, just that more of any given line will produce more revenue to the company.
Bad for quality, great for the corporate stocks!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
"I mean, the rest of the world has never had things like cars being different from one year to the next"
Puhleaaase!
How about Japan? How about Europe? How about the freakin' rest of the world!
Marketing folks don't understand that though. To them, faster product cycles = quicker access to profits and market advantage.
To engineering it means rushed deveopment schedules, hurried design, tooling, testing, and release to production.
Its a delicate scale. Push it too far towards marketing and you risk significant quality problems. Push it too far toward engineering and you miss your market window.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
This reminds me of something I read about digital cameras once. Apparently the product cycle for digital cameras is so rapid that one camera, by the time it was awarded camera of the year, was already out of production.
I suppose with PC assistence, designing and building just about anything has become easier. It used to take forever for ideas and techniques to spread. Nowadays if your stuck at anything, you can google for the answer. Applies more to software design, but at least it's easier for designers to find components now. Didn't it take only 6 months for the iPod designers complete the design from the outside in, using off the shelf parts. That would have been a lot harder if they didn't have the net and emails I'd wager.
May the Maths Be with you!
For the vast majority of people incremental releases are a pain in the ass. I dont want to install an application that has partial or buggy implementation and have to continually install newer versions to get over these issues. Release early/often might work for a limited developer audience but for a mass market I think people will just say if you cant do it properly first time then dont bother.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
There are 2 big areas that suffer in this faster life cycle.
1) Reliability - products will be more prone to fail. But, I guess this just forces you to go out and get a new one. Kind of like how many cars are now "disposable". You have them for a couple years and dispose of them to get new ones.
2) Quality - They aren't the quality products they used to be. They sure don't build them like they used to.
Evolution or ID?
This is yet another method in a long string of concocted schemes to stimulate artificial demand. Do we need a new car every year? Of course not but if we tweak the headlight to point in a different direction we can pawn it off as something new and improved and play to the elementary school insecurities of the American consumer and the need to have to have the latest fashion trend so as to be ahead of the Jones'. Look at the durable goods industry, appliances used to have a generic shape and would last consumers decades, now they are purposely designed with color patterns and quickly dating exterior body kit panels so that they can be disposable products in a couple of years when they break down or become rapidly dating fashion faux pas displaced by the next color change and bodykit panels.
of course, the flip side to this, is that you have to be satisfied with a camera that is "out of date"..
The major bad thing about this is that the more rapid the product cycle, the crappier the firmware or supporting desktop software is, making us more and more dependent on frequent and numerous software updates to get relatively bug-free operation.
With ultra-fast product cycles, we're looking at software obsolence and product abandonment far faster than we otherwise would have. The device may still work, but have critical bugs/problems/issues that aren't resolved without buying the next item in the product cycle.
It's obviously something less of an issue with devices that have a non-proprietary data interface (eg, memory cards), but something like the iPod really needs its proprietary software to function as designed. But it's still a critical issue regardless if the firmware inside the device doesn't work right.
I love updatable firmware, I hate the fact that it's become an excuse for manufacturers to release broken products and sometimes fix them as they go.
Currently there is a camera revolution going on so it is natural to expect to have alot of choice and new models. If you want to look at a mature market look at the VCR one, there is very little choice in the highstreet all are almost idendical, and the price is very low. I expect you will see the cameras that Minolta is removing are not well placed in the market, so they have taken the decision to replace a model that is only 6 months old with one that will perform better in the market, sound sensible to me! Considering the current size of the market and the lose of market share if they don't do this. I don't expect we will see a 6 months cycle, however to do expect to see poorly performing (in sales) cameras to be quickly replaced and better selling ones to be more slowly replaced.
All this will continue while the market is red hot (which is great for the customer). When it slows down the choice will not be so good but atleast everything will be cheap!
James
Konica-Minolta recently merged and before, Minolta was behind in the digital game. It is likely that they had a lot of R&D going on, but due to the merger, things were unclear and it took time to get things settled and to get products out the door (with the new name).
Bad example. If ever there was a product that needed improvement during its life cycle, it was the Beetle. How VW managed to avoid doing that, still baffles me.
Lets face it, the average consumer does not have the time or money to rush out and buy the new model every 6 months... I know that I for one dont replace my electronics until they break, or become very inconvinient to use, and I think most technology consumers are more that way than some tech obsessed people who replace everything they own the second something new comes out
its all marketing, they can release exactly the same product (and i mean identical) except for model number and people will buy it for more instead of the older version... its an old idea, where someone designs a perfect (literally) product, they still need to make the standard version worse, release some inferior and better versions but keep headroom above to keep releasing updates, if they release the product as a perfect one therell be a rush to buy it, but then once half your friends have it you dont want it anymore because you want to have something different... anyway...
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
Whenever you shorten a product development cycle, you always cut into QA and testing time. Shorter development cycles will inevitably lead to lower quality for the consumer over the long run.
Now, whether this lower quality will even be noticeable, or whether it is a valid tradeoff for increased functionality, is yet to be seen.
Because product testing takes time. Good testing takes lots of time. The cost of the testing, and time involved, has very little to do with what new features were added or changed, os it works out far better for people who test their products, if they have releases less often.
Mod point free since 2001
I like the way you've taken the opposite side to a lot of other people but even among your valid arguments I'd still rather just buy a product and have it last a long time. If it did what I bought it to do the day I bought it why shoulden't it do it in 1, 5 or even 10 years time. I know that in 1994 you could get a 486 machine for word processing and if you could still easily get printer cartriges for printers made in 1994 I'm sure it would still be quite a usefull machine, but do you still see people using equipment that old? I find it a sad fact that you don't and an environmental hazard to boot with all the wasted recources going into products that will be landfill in 2 or 3 years.
I know that I will always be one to laugh when I see a 4 year old fridge thrown out and a 40 year old fridge continue to cool like it was brand new. Even if it is only used to cool beer at some summer beachhouse I admire the fact that it was built to last. Imagine how satisfying it would be knowing that the camera you bought today was powered off a plutonium heat cell and would last as well as the Voyager probe.
I call it bad for the consumer. It is harder to keep track of what is good. Six months is not enough time for a product to gather a reputation, good or bad. When I'm new to a particular product, I generally look around for site reviews and user impressions.
That said, the auto industry isn't above having mid-year updates and mid-year introductions, they just don't do it often.
I don't think the computer necessarily benefitted from model year-itis, because products stick around for a good while after introduction and aren't removed from the market when a faster version is put out. They just don't hold themselves to introducing a new product at a specific time every year.
True, but at least you don't have to pay for kernel upgrades.
- Security updates. Microsoft provides them for free. Don't see how they could sell them.
- Data updates. Like with AVirus software. Updates to virus signatures. MS could sell a subscription to Powerpoint-Clipart Galleries with regular updates or new Fonts... well, that's what I can think right now
- Feature updates. That's what MS is trying to do with every major release. The Same with more features. People don't like the new office releases because of the feature-creep. I don't see how this would improve with small incremental updates.
Also MS tends to break backward compatibility to older Office version. People don't like that either.
I guess it's hard to sell software by subscription. Either you get some kind of data updates.
OTOH maybe they could sell a service, like others do with RPG Games like Everquest and the like. I Guess MS allready tried this kind of business with Passport and other MSN stuff. Didn't work out too good for now.
Greets HerbieStone
Or not fix them at all. Toshiba with their e740 may have just used a cheaper rom chip then a flashable chip as they neever released mroe then one firmware update and it still did not fix critical issues with the device. Then Microsoft released Windows Mobile 2003 and they did not offer an upgrade for it.
Flash to just 6 months ago when they released the e805. It was and currently still is the only PDA with a 640x480 LCD. Microsoft released Windows Mobile 2003 SE. Toshiba followed up and released it for the e805 (WM 2003 SE adds VGA support to all of it's components)...in Germany. They have, to date, not released this to the US market and have pretty much did what Sony did, pull out of the market. CompUSA doesn't have any e805's and it's been discontinued.
The problem now is that everyoen is trying to be the next cellphone and I am sorry, but it just does not work with anything other then cellphones. You can always get a new phone every 2 years if your willing to sign another two year contract. Tmobile has gotten this down to a year. The cellphone market came out like this because of the way our providers pushed signing new contracts. Essentially, even if you are already a subscriber, you can rework your deal, and get a new phone every 1-2 years....THIS DOES NOT WORK on devices that the purchase price is not subsidised. This is probably why Sony and others pulled out of the market. In ths US, cellphones appear to be free every 2 years, but they really aren't free. How do youi subsidise something with out a recurring monthly bill? You can't.
In most of Asia, small devices are and always have been all the rage. IN Japan, they buy these devices voraciously. In the US, we want something to last so it just does not work to release a new one every 6 months that's only evolutionary. Sure, we'd buy it if it really wow's you, but the WOW moves from one camp to another (like from PocketPC to Palm and back and forth) and then stalls out for about 6 months to a year. American's get PO'd when the device we bout 8 months ago is all of a sudden NOT getting updates to fix problems. SO we bag that vendor and go to another then they do the same thing. The 6 month cycle is nice, but it just does not work in the American market too well.
Gorkman
I always think it's a real shame when people keep old refrigerators around. Even putting aside the old death-trap fridges with the locking mechanisms that tend to kill children, the power consumption on old fridges is high enough to make the new models pay for themselves in energy savings.
Have you folks ever tried looking at houses? Prices are thru the roof. Not to mention houses are built left and right, and the quality is far from great considering how fast and easy they are build nowadays. Especially here in MA. A $400,000 house will need a decent amount of repair. So many money pits, no other industry is as evil to American consumers.