Originally Posted by Rarebird
I finally got around to watching this video. Obviously a scummy company in many of their business practices. Now that I know that I'd definitely think twice before giving them money. And it truly sucks that they would go after small companies who are trying to carve out a niche for themselves.
Copying everything about someone else's design (a clone) without bringing anything new to it also really sucks, whether it's totally legal or not. It's sort of low-effort and hard to respect. But in the cases where the original technology was created decades ago it's a bit harder to be sympathetic to those whose designs were copied.
The company I work for has a razor/razor blade type situation. We sell plasma cutters (razors) and the torches, nozzles, electrodes, etc. (razor blades) and the latter is our bread and butter. We work very hard at R&D to design the consumables - development can take years to perfect something that offers unique value. We buy our competitor's products and benchmark them and put them through the brutal testing we put our own stuff through to see how they stack up to our equipment. But we are still finding people who copy our stuff and didn't put in the work, sometimes creating completely counterfeit product with our name on it. Sometimes they don't do anything, just update their own product brochures to claim their stuff does what we spent years to develop.
But we also have a waterjet business, which is probably more analogous to the vintage synth situation. Waterjet technology has been around for 60+ years. There are several waterjet companies out there, but in many ways it's a very mature technology and truly disruptive innovations are rare (and difficult! I've been involved in these efforts). The consumable side of things is less profitable too and it's hard to differentiate - every company buys mixing tubes and diamond orifices from the same couple of companies. A few years back we had a guy steal all our design info and left to start his own aftermarket parts company and he undercuts many companies, the irony being perhaps that we were also selling aftermarket parts of items we'd reverse engineered from other companies, lol. But the designs are old and have no IP protection. It sucks, but the only way out is further innovation to offer value that no one else has. The cost of innovating in waterjet is MUCH higher than for plasma and to do the equivalent level of robustness testing for waterjet as we do for plasma is not only cost-prohibitive but would take much, much longer. (But I digress - development of an analog synth should be relatively short and simple.)
If you're just selling a Moog that has been virtually unchanged for decades you will be in a similar boat without continued innovation. It sucks to be up against a massive bully company with deep pockets.
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks