Hi Gordon,
Whilst I sympathise with your point of view, from a marketing perspective pre notification of a new model is a very sensitive business. Get it right and you steal a march on your competitors, get it wrong and you dissapoint and frustrate your customers, whilst killing your short term sales.
So far as the 14Mz using a windows interface, is this really so much of a problem? So far as I am aware the windows operating system does not interfer with the actual control operating system, and therefore when you eventually get the blue screen of death, the radio keeps working. OK, when you land you may have to do a soft reset, but so long as the program is backed up nothing is lost, or am I not understanding this right?
If it works this seems to me to be a good way forward.
Regards,
John
ORIGINAL: Gordon Mc
ORIGINAL: S_Ellzey
I doubt JR would announce a new radio untill it is ready, or very nearly ready, for release. The day they announce the "18XYZ super X" is the day that 10X sales stop, and 10X sales are appearently still good. There are a lot of guys out there who would buy a 10X today and the new super radio 6 months from now, if they did not know the new radio was coming out, but would wait if they knew of the new radio.
I agree
to a certain extent. Conversely, if a loyal JR customer asks whether JR is coming out with something new, gets told "No", buys another 10X and then 5 months later JR releases a new radio which has clearly been in extended development for some time.... then it seems to me that that customer would be entitled to be p'd off about being lied to, and might react by shifting alliances to the other camp. While JR (or any other company for that matter) may prefer to get a sale now rather than a sale in several months time, it could also be quite short-sighted of them to not realize that a sale a few months from now followed by more sales by someone who is loyal to the brand is perhaps better than one sale now followed by zero on-going sales due to having p'd the customer off.
Furthermore, I would think it is better to keep brand loyalty alive by letting the JR customers know that they can get what they want from JR if they are a little more patient, than to allow or perhaps even encourage brand defection by letting it appear that JR is not interested in giving us anything new. But ... I'm not a marketing guy - just a customer.
BTW, if a new JR radio comes out that is priced like the new Futaba radio, then while 10X sales would
drop, it's not necessarily true that
'The day they announce the "18XYZ super X" is the day that 10X sales stop' .... there will still be people for whom a $1000 TX is in their budget, but a $2400 one is not (or whatever the actual costs are). Additionally, if JR goes the Windoze route too [X(] without the ability of turning Windoze off while flying, they can expect sales of the 10X to still go on to people like me
YMMV, which is fine.
Gordon