6 ms·

Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous. I think that th

Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous. I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world. As soon as your product is successful, it will be cloned by dozens of Chinese companies and dumped on the market everywhere. Any update you make from there on out will immediately be folded into all those products selling for 10% what you do. In a couple years, they'll all be better than yours, and still way cheaper. So you have to do the Roomba thing or the GoPro thing, where you iterate behind the scenes until your thing is amazing, release it with a big Hollywood launch, get it turned into the noun and verb for your product category and the action that it does. But then you have to do what those companies didn't do: Fire everybody and rake in as much cash as possible before the inevitable flood of clones drowns you. I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.

_aavaa_ 10mo ago
Idk if I’d hold GoPro as an example of a company launching amazing things anymore…
- ses1984 10mo ago
  That's the point.
ragazzina 10mo ago
>I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen. Then make a nice blog post, translate it to Chinese (hell, I'll pay a professional translator for you) and post it on the internet so that someone in Shenzen can try it.
- thenthenthen 10mo ago
  Just post your ideas to crowdsource websites and wait for the aliexpress clone to appear, zero r&d costs, zero dev and manufacturing/qa! That said, Taobao and Ali are so full of bizarre products (transparent rubber domes to be able to type with 5cm long nail extensions), it will be a challenge to stand out
mitthrowaway2 10mo ago
Isn't that basically the reason patents exist? If you're really the first, you should be able to get about a 20 year head start.
- CamperBob2 10mo ago
  Coasting on their patents is exactly why iRobot went bankrupt. If they had a proper incentive to continue innovating, they might be around today. Instead, the patent system incentivized them to erect a tollgate and snooze away in the booth next to it.
  - mensetmanusman 10mo ago
    US companies can’t beat Chinese companies completely subsidized by their national government.
    - CamperBob2 10mo ago
      Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA? People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
      - palmotea 10mo ago
        >> US companies can’t beat Chinese companies completely subsidized by their national government. > Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA? Where are the new ones? Also Intel is not doing well, and the Chinese (after a fashion) Intel is TSMC, who also does NVIDIA's manufacturing. > People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying. So? That fact sounds like pablum. I think the real story of US manufacturing has been one of erosion of capabilities and long-term loss of strength. The US may still have a high ranking, but I'd bet: 1) much of that of that is low-volume and legacy, 2) second-place is still only 60% of what China does.
femiagbabiaka 10mo ago
I wonder why nobody has tried to beat the Chinese companies at their own game. The whole schtick is: take a product that people like, vertically integrate and drive down costs. This is like the purest form of capitalism.
- delichon 10mo ago
  E.g. Tesla: * built a lithium refinery * produces its own battery cells * makes its own motors and drivetrains * makes its own car seats * owns and operates a fast-charging network * sells direct, bypassing dealerships * offers insurance integrated with vehicle data * develops its own autopilot AI
  - femiagbabiaka 10mo ago
    Great point, and to drive it home -- TSLA is the only competitive non-Chinese company in the EV space. You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms, considering the whole U.S.-Taiwan stranglehold on chip mfg
    - ang_cire 10mo ago
      > You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms Except it's not winning on that at all. It's "winning" because Chinese EV brands are barred from selling in the US. You can't buy an Avatr if you want. It's in fact protectionist regulations that allowed Tesla to retain EV dominance in the US, in the face of Chinese competition.
      - femiagbabiaka 10mo ago
        Tesla was very popular in the Chinese market and globally, including in markets where Chinese EVs aren't banned, until literally this year, which I'd argue is due in part to the trade war.
  - 10mo ago
ralferoo 10mo ago
> I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen. Yeah, almost a decade ago I had a dream of creating a drone startup with some very specific tech that would have required several years of R&D to create. The end product would have been relatively cheap to manufacture, being basically a PCB with a large FPGA plus a bunch of relatively cheap sensors. I actually got about 6 months into the project, and then realised that although it was a great project and if it worked well, I'd be able to make units for about 25% of a viable RRP and be able to recoup all my time doing R&D without an income with maybe 5k units in direct sales. And then it slowly dawned on me that if I could build it for 25% of a viable RRP, then the Chinese cloners could do it even cheaper, and all they'd have to do was reverse engineer the protection on the FPGA bitstream to clone it and clone a pretty simple PCB. At the time, the drone market was full of cloned components for a fraction of the price of the original price, or of open source projects sold for half the price of the official boards to support the project. In such a situation, the only way to really survive is to innovate faster than the cloners can copy it, but that's kind of predicated on making a product that you know isn't what you want the final product to be from the start, so that you can drip feed the improvements into the market every time the previous version was cloned. That would also have the side effect of alienating the early adopters, as well as making new customers wonder how long it'd be before the new product was obsolete. Ultimately, I decided that realistically it wasn't viable to continue doing R&D for another couple of years, unsure if I'd actually be able to pay myself going forward.
abtinf 10mo ago
How does your theory account for Dyson?
- decimalenough 10mo ago
  A lot of Dyson products are wildly overpriced and kind of shit, but people keep buying them because they look pretty.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 10mo ago
    Some are also quite good. I’ve rescued and revived over 6 Dyson hand helds. Almost all still work well. There’s also a good after market ecosystem and 3D models you and print for various attachments.
ang_cire 10mo ago
This isn't unique to China, it's just the nature of modern manufacturing. The only reason China stands out is because we offshored our manu there, so it's where we see it happen. I feel like people forget that the entire purpose of factories/ automation/ modern manufacturing was to divorce human skill from product worth (so that companies wouldn't have to pay workers based on skill). That also means that in the realm of physical goods, "moats" are not maintainable unless you have a manufacturing technique or technology that others don't. Since companies rarely create their own production line machinery, anyone else who can afford the same machines can produce the same products. The actual "viable strategy for hardware companies" has to be about market penetration; make products that aren't on Amazon, for example, and Amazon can't be used to out-maneuver you. Firearms are a great example of where manufacturing capability does not equal competitiveness; China can absolutely produce any firearm that you can buy in the US, but they don't because other factors (mostly related to regulatory controls) created a moat for manufacturers. Vehicles are another good example. Good luck buying an Avatr car in the US. But yes, if you plan to make a vacuum, which is just you iterating on what others have done as well, you should probably expect that people are going to trivially iterate on your variant too.
throwaway_20357 10mo ago
> I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world. Isn't there also the "premium" route? Charge ~3x the price of your Chinese competitor but provide a product that: * is well designed * can claim to be (at least partial) domestic manufacturing * prioritizes repairability, offering a solid warranty, long-term software updates, and spare part availability * uses high-quality materials to ensure longevity and refuses to compromise customer safety for company profit If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better.
- drdaeman 10mo ago
  > If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better. Isn't it more like "if society has time to think about and can afford those qualities"? If most folks out there have limited finances (CoL-relative, of course) and are just scrapping by, they'll buy the cheapest thing out there that just does the job (vacuums) and tend to ignore any extra luxuries, even if those would be more economically advantageous long-term (repairs/maintenance part of the TCO). That's simply because of the focus - it's more on the account balance, due bills and next paycheck, than on the implications for a more distant future. Crazy volatility and all the global rollercoasters like pandemics, wars, and all the crazy politicians around the world doesn't help regular folks' sensible decision-making at all, of course. The more stressed one is, the less rational they act. People don't buy cheap junk because they don't value quality. They buy it primarily because of affordability reasons, or because their focus is forced to be elsewhere.
  - neuralRiot 10mo ago
    >People don't buy cheap junk because they don't value quality. They buy it primarily because of affordability reasons, or because their focus is forced to be elsewhere. The focus, thanks to years of advertising, is shifted towards features, new features sell, quality doesn’t, so to keep the price point and “innovate” manufacturers need to lower the quality knowing that a new version will replace the device soon, most consumers see this as normal so when a poorly designed and cheaply made thing for what there’s no replacement parts , no repair info, no software/ firmware fails is just an excuse to purchase the new shiny iteration with all the the bells and whistles (and AI!, copilot toaster!) wich is gonna last les than the previous one but now needs an “app” an activation and a subscription for the premium features .
starryex 10mo ago
Having done the hardware game, it's not so much the clones that get you, it's the VCs/shareholders. You need a lot of money to make hardware, so you get vc money and eventually shareholder money. But if you're not selling new hardware all the time, the company isn't making money. So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly. Making new hardware yearly is enough of an undertaking that you no longer have time to iterate on the software that could enable new features. And often hardware iterations aren't going to change that much, it's hard to "invent" new hardware. It's better to make a hardware platform that enables new exciting features, and iterate on the software. But that isn't going to sell yearly. So unless you have a software subscription model that people love, every hardware company tends to stagnate because they are too busy making hardware yearly to make "better" products. You see this very clearly in cameras vs phones. The camera companies are still making cameras yearly but none of them incorporate the software features that have led phones to outpace them. A lot of phones with so so cameras take better pictures (to the average eye) than actual cameras because the software features enhance the photos. I worked on firmware for such a "noun and verb" product that IPOd a decade ago, and lived the struggle realtime.
- Tangurena2 10mo ago
  > So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly. Or - turn it into a subscription.
gred 10mo ago
> I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen. Isn't this why patents exist?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- gleenn 10mo ago
  Yes, but China or one of the many other countries that don't respect US patents could care less.
anymouse123456 10mo ago
This is the worst possible strategy. Innovate something of real value, sit on it for years and then blame everyone but yourself when competitors finally figure out how to exceed the performance of your now-outdated bullshit. I remember when Apple finally cracked the idea that consumers would be willing to pay a premium for a more attractive computer. At the time, I thought they had a 2-5 year lead at best. Turns out they just kept making more and more high quality devices and not one organization has figured out how to compete with them, even now that they’re starting to lose sight of the values made them so great.

_aavaa_ 10mo ago

Idk if I’d hold GoPro as an example of a company launching amazing things anymore…

ses1984 10mo ago
That's the point.

ragazzina 10mo ago

>I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen. Then make a nice blog post, translate it to Chinese (hell, I'll pay a professional translator for you) and post it on the internet so that someone in Shenzen can try it.

thenthenthen 10mo ago
Just post your ideas to crowdsource websites and wait for the aliexpress clone to appear, zero r&d costs, zero dev and manufacturing/qa! That said, Taobao and Ali are so full of bizarre products (transparent rubber domes to be able to type with 5cm long nail extensions), it will be a challenge to stand out

mitthrowaway2 10mo ago

Isn't that basically the reason patents exist? If you're really the first, you should be able to get about a 20 year head start.

CamperBob2 10mo ago
Coasting on their patents is exactly why iRobot went bankrupt. If they had a proper incentive to continue innovating, they might be around today. Instead, the patent system incentivized them to erect a tollgate and snooze away in the booth next to it.
- mensetmanusman 10mo ago
  US companies can’t beat Chinese companies completely subsidized by their national government.
  - CamperBob2 10mo ago
    Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA? People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
    - palmotea 10mo ago
      >> US companies can’t beat Chinese companies completely subsidized by their national government. > Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA? Where are the new ones? Also Intel is not doing well, and the Chinese (after a fashion) Intel is TSMC, who also does NVIDIA's manufacturing. > People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying. So? That fact sounds like pablum. I think the real story of US manufacturing has been one of erosion of capabilities and long-term loss of strength. The US may still have a high ranking, but I'd bet: 1) much of that of that is low-volume and legacy, 2) second-place is still only 60% of what China does.

femiagbabiaka 10mo ago

I wonder why nobody has tried to beat the Chinese companies at their own game. The whole schtick is: take a product that people like, vertically integrate and drive down costs. This is like the purest form of capitalism.

delichon 10mo ago
E.g. Tesla: * built a lithium refinery * produces its own battery cells * makes its own motors and drivetrains * makes its own car seats * owns and operates a fast-charging network * sells direct, bypassing dealerships * offers insurance integrated with vehicle data * develops its own autopilot AI
- femiagbabiaka 10mo ago
  Great point, and to drive it home -- TSLA is the only competitive non-Chinese company in the EV space. You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms, considering the whole U.S.-Taiwan stranglehold on chip mfg
  - ang_cire 10mo ago
    > You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms Except it's not winning on that at all. It's "winning" because Chinese EV brands are barred from selling in the US. You can't buy an Avatr if you want. It's in fact protectionist regulations that allowed Tesla to retain EV dominance in the US, in the face of Chinese competition.
    - femiagbabiaka 10mo ago
      Tesla was very popular in the Chinese market and globally, including in markets where Chinese EVs aren't banned, until literally this year, which I'd argue is due in part to the trade war.
- 10mo ago

ralferoo 10mo ago

> I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen. Yeah, almost a decade ago I had a dream of creating a drone startup with some very specific tech that would have required several years of R&D to create. The end product would have been relatively cheap to manufacture, being basically a PCB with a large FPGA plus a bunch of relatively cheap sensors. I actually got about 6 months into the project, and then realised that although it was a great project and if it worked well, I'd be able to make units for about 25% of a viable RRP and be able to recoup all my time doing R&D without an income with maybe 5k units in direct sales. And then it slowly dawned on me that if I could build it for 25% of a viable RRP, then the Chinese cloners could do it even cheaper, and all they'd have to do was reverse engineer the protection on the FPGA bitstream to clone it and clone a pretty simple PCB. At the time, the drone market was full of cloned components for a fraction of the price of the original price, or of open source projects sold for half the price of the official boards to support the project. In such a situation, the only way to really survive is to innovate faster than the cloners can copy it, but that's kind of predicated on making a product that you know isn't what you want the final product to be from the start, so that you can drip feed the improvements into the market every time the previous version was cloned. That would also have the side effect of alienating the early adopters, as well as making new customers wonder how long it'd be before the new product was obsolete. Ultimately, I decided that realistically it wasn't viable to continue doing R&D for another couple of years, unsure if I'd actually be able to pay myself going forward.

abtinf 10mo ago

How does your theory account for Dyson?

decimalenough 10mo ago
A lot of Dyson products are wildly overpriced and kind of shit, but people keep buying them because they look pretty.
- 2muchcoffeeman 10mo ago
  Some are also quite good. I’ve rescued and revived over 6 Dyson hand helds. Almost all still work well. There’s also a good after market ecosystem and 3D models you and print for various attachments.

ang_cire 10mo ago

This isn't unique to China, it's just the nature of modern manufacturing. The only reason China stands out is because we offshored our manu there, so it's where we see it happen. I feel like people forget that the entire purpose of factories/ automation/ modern manufacturing was to divorce human skill from product worth (so that companies wouldn't have to pay workers based on skill). That also means that in the realm of physical goods, "moats" are not maintainable unless you have a manufacturing technique or technology that others don't. Since companies rarely create their own production line machinery, anyone else who can afford the same machines can produce the same products. The actual "viable strategy for hardware companies" has to be about market penetration; make products that aren't on Amazon, for example, and Amazon can't be used to out-maneuver you. Firearms are a great example of where manufacturing capability does not equal competitiveness; China can absolutely produce any firearm that you can buy in the US, but they don't because other factors (mostly related to regulatory controls) created a moat for manufacturers. Vehicles are another good example. Good luck buying an Avatr car in the US. But yes, if you plan to make a vacuum, which is just you iterating on what others have done as well, you should probably expect that people are going to trivially iterate on your variant too.

throwaway_20357 10mo ago

> I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world. Isn't there also the "premium" route? Charge ~3x the price of your Chinese competitor but provide a product that: * is well designed * can claim to be (at least partial) domestic manufacturing * prioritizes repairability, offering a solid warranty, long-term software updates, and spare part availability * uses high-quality materials to ensure longevity and refuses to compromise customer safety for company profit If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better.

drdaeman 10mo ago
> If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better. Isn't it more like "if society has time to think about and can afford those qualities"? If most folks out there have limited finances (CoL-relative, of course) and are just scrapping by, they'll buy the cheapest thing out there that just does the job (vacuums) and tend to ignore any extra luxuries, even if those would be more economically advantageous long-term (repairs/maintenance part of the TCO). That's simply because of the focus - it's more on the account balance, due bills and next paycheck, than on the implications for a more distant future. Crazy volatility and all the global rollercoasters like pandemics, wars, and all the crazy politicians around the world doesn't help regular folks' sensible decision-making at all, of course. The more stressed one is, the less rational they act. People don't buy cheap junk because they don't value quality. They buy it primarily because of affordability reasons, or because their focus is forced to be elsewhere.
- neuralRiot 10mo ago
  >People don't buy cheap junk because they don't value quality. They buy it primarily because of affordability reasons, or because their focus is forced to be elsewhere. The focus, thanks to years of advertising, is shifted towards features, new features sell, quality doesn’t, so to keep the price point and “innovate” manufacturers need to lower the quality knowing that a new version will replace the device soon, most consumers see this as normal so when a poorly designed and cheaply made thing for what there’s no replacement parts , no repair info, no software/ firmware fails is just an excuse to purchase the new shiny iteration with all the the bells and whistles (and AI!, copilot toaster!) wich is gonna last les than the previous one but now needs an “app” an activation and a subscription for the premium features .

starryex 10mo ago

Having done the hardware game, it's not so much the clones that get you, it's the VCs/shareholders. You need a lot of money to make hardware, so you get vc money and eventually shareholder money. But if you're not selling new hardware all the time, the company isn't making money. So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly. Making new hardware yearly is enough of an undertaking that you no longer have time to iterate on the software that could enable new features. And often hardware iterations aren't going to change that much, it's hard to "invent" new hardware. It's better to make a hardware platform that enables new exciting features, and iterate on the software. But that isn't going to sell yearly. So unless you have a software subscription model that people love, every hardware company tends to stagnate because they are too busy making hardware yearly to make "better" products. You see this very clearly in cameras vs phones. The camera companies are still making cameras yearly but none of them incorporate the software features that have led phones to outpace them. A lot of phones with so so cameras take better pictures (to the average eye) than actual cameras because the software features enhance the photos. I worked on firmware for such a "noun and verb" product that IPOd a decade ago, and lived the struggle realtime.

Tangurena2 10mo ago
> So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly. Or - turn it into a subscription.

gred 10mo ago

> I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen. Isn't this why patents exist?

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
gleenn 10mo ago
Yes, but China or one of the many other countries that don't respect US patents could care less.

anymouse123456 10mo ago

This is the worst possible strategy. Innovate something of real value, sit on it for years and then blame everyone but yourself when competitors finally figure out how to exceed the performance of your now-outdated bullshit. I remember when Apple finally cracked the idea that consumers would be willing to pay a premium for a more attractive computer. At the time, I thought they had a 2-5 year lead at best. Turns out they just kept making more and more high quality devices and not one organization has figured out how to compete with them, even now that they’re starting to lose sight of the values made them so great.