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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
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
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.
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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
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.
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.
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!
No that was the 0 job cycle.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
There is a big downside of such rapid product changes. It takes a fair amount of time to stock the sales channel. This means that before you see the latest digital camera on the shelf at the local camera store, it has to go through a three or four hands. This means that a product that is going to be replaced in six months spends the first month or more not available to people. Also, when a new product is introduced all the existing products that are in stock go down in value. If you are running a retail store, you can easily get stuck with product that is obsolete but can't be sold for cost. This is what caused the big computer retails to have so much of a problem when they were reluctant to mark down old product. This was especially true in the height of video card wars.
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.
So, a six month turn around is equivalent to making sure devices are destroyed every six months via internal bomb/bios coding to shut down/*insert other paranoid ranting*? I don't know how they could force me to buy a new anything really. I, for one, still have a 5 year old cell phone, a 4 year old digital camera, and a 10 year old car, all of which have fast turn around rates. All of them work as well as I need, so how am I being forced to upgrade? It could be said that they aren't working properly, but really, cell phone companies are about the worst for pushing out new products for no reason and trying to make old products seem inferior.
I'm always right and I can prove it, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never been wrong.
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...