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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.
Analyzing the 6-month life cycle from the different points of view...
Consumer - on one hand (as the second link points out), this is great for the consumer, because newer models causes the prices on the older models to drop, and then the consumer can possibly afford "more" camera then they otherwise could...of course, the flip side to this, is that you have to be satisfied with a camera that is "out of date"...
Retail Store - although I'm sure all major electronic stores like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc, have excellent supply chain management, I still gotta believe they get stuck holding the bag a little when new cameras are announced every six months, and suddenly all of the current cameras they had in stock suddenly become devalued...
Camera Company - obviously this is good for them...we've seen it time and time again, with cell phones being the most recent example...even though a consumer may be happy with their current product, they just have to have the most up-to-date, shiny, feature filled version of whatever it may be (cell phone, camera, pc, etc)...
The bottom line is, I still think it's good for the consumer...look what this same type of accelerated cycle has done for the home PC...parents everywhere can now buy much more PC then they could ever use, very cheaply...yoou just gotta be able to live with not having the best and fastest thing out there (ugh, this might be the wrong forum to propose that idea)...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
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
I've often wondered why Microsoft and the other main software companies have not abandonded the idea of major product releases. Incremental releases (like those in the OSS world) make a lot more sense, as the product then evolves more organically. There is no real reason why MS couldn't start doing this for it's products. It would be much easier to get people to "subscribe" to products then, which would be good in the long term for Microsoft's revenue stream.
The fashion industry has been dealing with this forever, and I predict similar trends will appear in music (closing fast), and then computers. By the time you buy something that's 'in fashion' at a traditional store, the designers have already released the next season's line. There is absolutely no way to stay 100% current, unless you are a designer yourself, and even then, your wardrobe will always be off by about 3 seasons.
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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?
Honestly, technology does advance fast enough in some fields to support this kind of cycle. It's kind of hard to do it in a more matured area, like automobiles or household appliances, but when the technology behind digital cameras is constantly improving it only makes sense to push it out quickly; before that new technology is made obsolete.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
I can't imagine physical products are much different. Sure, you get a new model every 6 months, but what's really changed? Personally, I'd like to wait a year, and get a substantial benefit. My experience is that shorter cycles are good for the marketing droids (who always have vaporware "almost" ready to release) and bad for the customer and the developer.
Oh, and another funny thing. The same customers who demand quarterly releases also bitch about the fact they have to migrate ever four months. I told them there was a simple solution to that problem... :)
One of the things I have disliked about the computer industry and it's constant improvement is what I have started calling Versionitis. It seems that something 'bigger, badder, and faster' is always around the corner. Due to the cost of some of these items it sure makes some consumers go into a infinite loop waiting for the 'next big thing'.
What fails to get mentioned or noticed by consumers is that digital cameras and mega pixels they support have reached a plateau as to what they are used for to why I need that many MP.
3MP was enough for a 8x10 print, 6MP got you into the 13x19 range. anything higher than that just makes the files bigger and can introduce more compression artifacts as you try and reduce the file size with all the detail presented.
I've got a Canon D60 that I bought in 2002. I've been adding lenses and the like over the last few years but the camera itself is a workhorse and I have no MP reason to replace it. however I'd like a few faster things like shutter speed and whatnot more than how many MP they do.
I've had to reign in my self-control quite a few times on big ticket items. It was about 18 months ago when I decided that getting a new computer once a year was stupid and a waste of money. My Powerbook G4 867Mhz is doing me just fine still. The only thing that'd force an upgrade is manipulating larger MP camera images in Photoshop, so keeping everything in check on upgrades sure helps keep money for other things.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
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!
I purchased a 799$ camera that then went to 799$ with a 100$ rebate, about 10 days after I purchased. then to 699 after the return policy/price match date ran out..
I've also done this with cell phones, and cpu's
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I think it ia WALL*MARTidous, everyone wants the best stuff cheap, companies are trying to meet the demand, but there are still a few people who want quality, look at PCs, dell==CHEAP, they sell zillions of units a year, vs. say aleinware, or apple who combined don even touch half of dell, but have MUCH better quality.
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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
No, your parent was right.
The most popular car in europe, the VW Golf, is right now in its 5th incarnation, since about a year or so. I bought my own Golf IV in 2000, and it was already 2 years old then (my car, not the general Golf IV model, that was older). It is not a "98' Golf", though, but a "Golf IV", and nobody really cares about the production year, except maybe a local garage, when a certain part changed due to some production reason.
And that is really different from the habit of labeling american cars by their production year and the model name. It just is. No amount of "Puhleaaase!" can change that.
"If you're enjoying your work, you're not working hard enough." - Scottish proverb.
Stick Men
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).
The only reason i can find for this is about TCO (total cost of ownership)
My dad had a TV set that lasted 20 years. Yeah 20 years non-stop. 3 years with a computer and it's already trash. Same with cellphones, printers, etc, etc... You spend a lot more to keep those devices working.
My Canon bjc4000 printer is about 8 years old and it's better than most new cheap printers.
I always wondered why they didn't call the new company "Monica".
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
Here's my perspective based on far too much time working as a Product Manager:
I strongly prefer development models that are based on incremental releases that ship at regular intervals. Ideally, I prefer systems in which a new version of the product ships one every 4 monthes. Those features/functions that are "ready" get included in a release. Features that aren't ready will be slipped until the next version.
This development process requires MUCH more work to set up. Code needs to be modular enough that features can be added/subtracted from a candidate without destablizing the entire system. Furthermore, there isn't much down time for release engineering. As soon as one release has shipped out the door, the next one is almost ready for testing.
With this said and done: From my perspective, companies that focus on a small number of "Hail Mary" releases produce crappy products. If you only shipping one release every 18 -24 months then EVERYTHING gets shipped with that release, regardless of the quality of the code. Equally significant, your release engineering process inevitably gets very sloppy since the individuals running this never get sufficient practice. Finally, you are inevitably forced to push out large numbers of patches to fix all the crap that contaminated your original version. These patch releases re-introduce most of the same problems that crop up with a "regular" release model, but without the right infrastructure to support this model.
Far better to bite the bullet and design for success from the beginning...
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.
My Minolta A1 should be delivered tomorrow, and now it's already discontinued and out of date.
Just like kernel releases, I guess...
Ydco co
Yeah , we have VW's over in the US also. They are also quite popular. In fact we have quite a few European cars companies over here. Except for the crap ones like Renault and Citroen. Cars generally go on atleast a 3 year cycle in which they do not have any major changes. The parent post really was stupid as it was implies that the cars are under going a major change every year. Popular models generally keep their name even though the design changes. For example the Honda civic has been around since the late 70's. I have a 91 Civic that shared the same body design from 88 to 2003. The tendency to keep a popular name over many variations isn't just an American thing. I see no difference between this and my European friends who drool over the the latest Merc's and BMW's.
I don't care about somethings changing all the time, others bug me out. My pet peeve is cell phones. The entire cell phone industry should be standardized so that all batteries, chargers, and other items would fit every phone. Heck, I'd like them to one print cartiridge for 1-2 years across all the models. It seems with ink jet printers that they are on a 3 month cycle. (I'd rather just have one decent item that I know is good and buy that one each time.)
I hate having to look up the new model and if all the extras would still fit into the new model. It is very annoying.
OK, so the US has a telephone system to rival most third-world countries, but *most* cellular networks are digital.
The digital camera industry is in a huge boom right now, as "the other 50%" of the population starts their migration towards digital photography.
No one who just bought a digital camera will replace theirs in the next 6 months - a few companies used to offer buy-back and trade-in options when new models came out but not anymore, so you're stuck with dropping $300-$3000
The real reason behind all this constant upgrading is that the manufactures are trying to woo those who are trying to convert to digital photography. The millions of film SLR users who are packing up their dark rooms and looking for a camera that won't break the bank yet still be versatile enough to fit them (this is also why the Nikon D70 and Canon Digital Rebel are selling like hot-cakes laced with cocaine). All the manufacturers have to have a superior product, so they'll come out with a new revision every 6 months so long as they can best the competition and expand their share of the digital-convert market.
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).
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I think the overlying job of technology is to completely overturn old technology, say 'heh, that was easy, wonder what we can steamroller next?'
Currently, Digital photography and portable music players have a bullseye painted on 'em, but the same happened with keyboards, mice, cellphones, PDA's, laser printers, video cards, etc.
There's a period of churn, where the vendors fight for every last scrap, then move on leaving one or two large players and razor-thin margins.
I predict flat screens will be the next big target, what with DLP, LCD, and LCoS technologies falling under the economy of scale.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
While manufacturers may be releasing products on an accelerated schedule, the internal chipsets tend to have longer lives. For example, Canon's DIGIC chips have been used in a variety of consumer digital cams and camcorders - the trick is to create a roadmap of features to roll out over the given lifespan of the chips (say 18 months or two years). I do this in my job, too -- When I design a board, it includes jumpers and additional pads so that future enhancements such as a larger front panel or USB can be cheaply added at build time. This lets us amortize the R&D over a reasonable time, while ensuring a quality core.
...one that NIC makers seem notorious for (in my past experience D-Link was the WORST for this).
It's the practice of releasing a new "revision" of the same model that is essentially a totally different product, which give the perception of a longer product cycle when it has actually been a scant six months for a long time.
For example, why the HELL do they make a product called "D-Link DFE530" for a few months, then drop it and release ANOTHER "D-Link DFE530" with COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CHIPS on it? They are even dumb enough to do things like put them in the same box--the only way to tell them apart is by a little revision sticker they MAY put on the box, or more likely silk-screen onto the board itself.
This type of crap is so infuriating one is tempted to call for it to be outlawed. If a customer's DFE530 breaks and he goes to get another DFE530 you shouldn't have to worry about changing the driver for the "new" DFE530. And if you wonder where some of the bloat in Windows comes from, pick apart some drivers--they are often multiple drivers packed into one, with code to identify which is the proper one for the given "revision". If you're unlucky to have an older driver without code for the new "revision" you have to upgrade it. Not user friendly in the slightest--even if the driver ships on disk with the card.
That is why I vote with my wallet...my experience with D-Link made me stop buying ALL D-link products altogether. All my computers use Intel NICs now. Now that I know that Linksys and Netgear pull the same stunts my personal embargo will now extend to them. Thanks for the heads up.
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.