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Found the eink employee. Kidding! You do make some interesting points re: licensing and patents and such. I think the complaint I hear leveled, is that there

Found the eink employee. Kidding! You do make some interesting points re: licensing and patents and such. I think the complaint I hear leveled, is that there is a patent, and it is licensed, but at exhobrinant cost. Thus, eink is "too expensive" for true derivative innovation, and even widespread sale. You might do better to speak to that accusation directly. In high school economics, we learned of min/max pricing theory. If you price your widgets at 100 dollars profit per unit, you'll sell 10 of them a year. If you price them at 1 buck per, you'll sell 1000. But... you'll have additional support costs, returns, other ancillary costs when selling 1000 units compared to 10. So at the 1 profit price point, you need additional staff, larger facilities, more manufacturing capability, etc. Sometimes, licensing is like this. Fewer units sold, but better profit. Maybe the eink lads believe the tech can never scale beyond niche, won't take off, so are just milking the market at the highest licensing fees they can get? Maybe even raw licensing, without per unit sale fees? Thus, higher up front costs, as no confidence i sales numbers? Plus no internal audit costs with licensing, sales, compliance? Just thoughts on why the high licensing costs, may be true.

robinsoh 5y ago
> You might do better to speak to that accusation directly. That's the thing. I'm trying to figure out exactly what the accusation is. So far, every time I've challenged comments made about this, people have been vague and unwilling to state anything verifiable. To be frank, I don't even think any of the people making those comments are actually display people. > Maybe the eink lads believe the tech can never scale beyond niche, won't take off, so are just milking the market at the highest licensing fees they can get? I don't even know what the meaning of "eink licenses their technology" would mean. That's way too vague. It would be the equivalent of saying "Samsung Displays licenses their technology". All I know is that Eink sells electrophoretic FPL and then their various partners produce things using that FPL. You can buy miles of their FPL if you want for dollars per yard or something like that. You can drive it using your own tech, laminate whatever backplane you want to it. What I know for sure is the high volume displays like the ones that go into Kindles are cheap, and everything else is like 10x more expensive simply because they're so low volume they might as well be hand assembled.
- daniel_reetz 5y ago
  As a fellow display engineer, thank you.
- derefr 5y ago
  The explicit accusation, AFAICT, is that eInk holds certain patent(s) which cannot be avoided if you want to produce an electrophoretic-technology display panel yourself; and so people believe eInk are, through these patents, “strangling the market for innovation.” They believe that, without those patents (or if those patents were instead in the public domain), companies that produce traditional display panels (like yours!) would be competitively iterating on electrophoretic display-panel technology in the process of manufacturing their own to sell into the market (either vertically-integrated, or as panel wholesalers), the same way they competitively iterate on LCD and LED-based display panel technologies; and that this would presumably produce market efficiencies that aren’t currently there. There could also be vertically-integrated niche panel+display companies focusing on niche use-cases, targeting a given vertical and doing “market education” for that vertical, creating demand for e.g. electrophoretic billboards, that isn’t currently there, “inventing the market” for themselves where each of these niches can eventually be a high-volume product of its own. And that would in turn drive additional innovation, as each of these companies would have a healthy margin to plow back into R&D. I think the intuitional belief behind this is that the blocking factor from this virtuous cycle beginning, is the fact that the entrepreneurs considering starting these niche companies, and the display bigcorps considering getting into this space, both consider that — when per-device patent licensing costs are included — the market is too low-margin to bother entering, even to chase a greenfield vertical. It only becomes “worth it” without the licensing fees. People’s intuition for this probably leans on analogies like the market for CPU innovation heating up again now that Apple has got away from relying on Intel and is producing their own CPUs. People would intuit that if display manufacturers could “get away from eInk” and “produce their own electrophoretic panels”, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” market would “heat up.”
  - robinsoh 5y ago
    > The explicit accusation, AFAICT, is that eInk holds certain patent(s) which cannot be avoided if you want to produce an electrophoretic-technology display panel yourself They don't hold such a patent, at least as far as I know. Which is presumably how their competitors like ClearInk, Reinkstone are able to be in business. > so people believe eInk are, through these patents, “strangling the market for innovation.” I don't understand why someone would believe that, especially people who aren't involved in the industry. As I mentioned, it would be the equivalent of me believing that Google was strangling the market of innovation in search engines and that Microsoft is strangling the market for innovation in operating systems. Although now that I think deeper about the line about Microsoft, maybe Microsoft is doing that? Is that why desktop Linux has not progressed at all and remains unusable? > People would intuit that if display manufacturers could “get away from eInk” and “produce their own electrophoretic panels”, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” market would “heat up.” Eink is considered a niche player in my industry. It would be the equivalent of perhaps a ultralowpower CPU manufacturer in the CPU industry. In my opinion, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” is not going to happen using electrophoretics because the physics of the problem is too challenging. In my opinion, the main reason why nothing is really happening there is because doing fundamental research on display technologies is expensive. Bezos spent hundreds of millions on Liquavista before he killed it, I'm pretty sure Qualcomm spent a lot on Mirasol. The problem is VCs don't want to invest in hard problems. They can get a quicker return from yet another internet service, AI/ML, another airbnb, another uber, another payment gateway and so on.

robinsoh 5y ago

> You might do better to speak to that accusation directly. That's the thing. I'm trying to figure out exactly what the accusation is. So far, every time I've challenged comments made about this, people have been vague and unwilling to state anything verifiable. To be frank, I don't even think any of the people making those comments are actually display people. > Maybe the eink lads believe the tech can never scale beyond niche, won't take off, so are just milking the market at the highest licensing fees they can get? I don't even know what the meaning of "eink licenses their technology" would mean. That's way too vague. It would be the equivalent of saying "Samsung Displays licenses their technology". All I know is that Eink sells electrophoretic FPL and then their various partners produce things using that FPL. You can buy miles of their FPL if you want for dollars per yard or something like that. You can drive it using your own tech, laminate whatever backplane you want to it. What I know for sure is the high volume displays like the ones that go into Kindles are cheap, and everything else is like 10x more expensive simply because they're so low volume they might as well be hand assembled.

daniel_reetz 5y ago
As a fellow display engineer, thank you.
derefr 5y ago
The explicit accusation, AFAICT, is that eInk holds certain patent(s) which cannot be avoided if you want to produce an electrophoretic-technology display panel yourself; and so people believe eInk are, through these patents, “strangling the market for innovation.” They believe that, without those patents (or if those patents were instead in the public domain), companies that produce traditional display panels (like yours!) would be competitively iterating on electrophoretic display-panel technology in the process of manufacturing their own to sell into the market (either vertically-integrated, or as panel wholesalers), the same way they competitively iterate on LCD and LED-based display panel technologies; and that this would presumably produce market efficiencies that aren’t currently there. There could also be vertically-integrated niche panel+display companies focusing on niche use-cases, targeting a given vertical and doing “market education” for that vertical, creating demand for e.g. electrophoretic billboards, that isn’t currently there, “inventing the market” for themselves where each of these niches can eventually be a high-volume product of its own. And that would in turn drive additional innovation, as each of these companies would have a healthy margin to plow back into R&D. I think the intuitional belief behind this is that the blocking factor from this virtuous cycle beginning, is the fact that the entrepreneurs considering starting these niche companies, and the display bigcorps considering getting into this space, both consider that — when per-device patent licensing costs are included — the market is too low-margin to bother entering, even to chase a greenfield vertical. It only becomes “worth it” without the licensing fees. People’s intuition for this probably leans on analogies like the market for CPU innovation heating up again now that Apple has got away from relying on Intel and is producing their own CPUs. People would intuit that if display manufacturers could “get away from eInk” and “produce their own electrophoretic panels”, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” market would “heat up.”
- robinsoh 5y ago
  > The explicit accusation, AFAICT, is that eInk holds certain patent(s) which cannot be avoided if you want to produce an electrophoretic-technology display panel yourself They don't hold such a patent, at least as far as I know. Which is presumably how their competitors like ClearInk, Reinkstone are able to be in business. > so people believe eInk are, through these patents, “strangling the market for innovation.” I don't understand why someone would believe that, especially people who aren't involved in the industry. As I mentioned, it would be the equivalent of me believing that Google was strangling the market of innovation in search engines and that Microsoft is strangling the market for innovation in operating systems. Although now that I think deeper about the line about Microsoft, maybe Microsoft is doing that? Is that why desktop Linux has not progressed at all and remains unusable? > People would intuit that if display manufacturers could “get away from eInk” and “produce their own electrophoretic panels”, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” market would “heat up.” Eink is considered a niche player in my industry. It would be the equivalent of perhaps a ultralowpower CPU manufacturer in the CPU industry. In my opinion, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” is not going to happen using electrophoretics because the physics of the problem is too challenging. In my opinion, the main reason why nothing is really happening there is because doing fundamental research on display technologies is expensive. Bezos spent hundreds of millions on Liquavista before he killed it, I'm pretty sure Qualcomm spent a lot on Mirasol. The problem is VCs don't want to invest in hard problems. They can get a quicker return from yet another internet service, AI/ML, another airbnb, another uber, another payment gateway and so on.