Supplier Competition

History has taught men that competition is necessary for the development of a stronger civilization. Even when it is forced upon them.

Cudos Gavin, you hit the nail on the head with your revealing article.

I recently reviewed some Chinese software for implementation and was pleasantly surprised at how good it was.?ÿ Ultimately it would not work in its present state for what I was trying to do, but, I have my eye on them now.?ÿ Things are changing

Waiting for Switzerland to put their Uyghur minority in concentration camps and use that labor to lower the price of Leica gear.?ÿ?ÿ

That is an interesting article; thanks. I can relate to a similar trend in electronic test equipment. I work in electrical / electronic / software engineering, and years ago, for test equipment, Tektronix was the top name for oscilloscopes and Hewlett-Packard was it for most of everything else (and I mean the classic HP that made professional equipment, not the consumer-products company to which it deteriorated). Those were both US companies that made very high quality, very expensive instruments. A few years ago, I was looking to get a new oscilloscope, primarily for personal use. I have two early-1980s vintage Tektronix 'scopes that are very nice, but they were, essentially, wearing out. And, being purely analog instruments, they lack some features that are very handy to have.

In recent years, a few Chinese manufacturers of electronic test equipment have made strong entries into the market. One of them is Rigol. For a long time, I laughed them off. But when I wanted to buy a new 'scope a few years ago, I saw an intriguing model from Rigol, and ended up buying it. It's a lightweight, compact, four-channel 'scope, that complete with four probes and a carrying case cost $300, delivered. At that price, it was pretty much in the "nothing to lose" category. That's a small fraction of what I'd expect to pay for traditional equipment. Sure, the Rigol probes seem cheap and delicate compared to what we used to get from Tektronix, and some of the design choices by the Chinese engineers are naive and laughable (e.g. displaying some parameters with ridiculously huge numbers of significant digits), but this little 'scope is AMAZING for what it does for $300. It works reliably, is easy to use, and has a slew of very useful software-based features. Even though I bought it with the primary intent of personal use, it has gone back and forth a lot with me to the office and has ended up mostly being used for paying work. It's really kind of stunning.

There's another interesting twist to this story. Hewlett-Packard's professional test equipment business (their original business, from 1939, by the way) was spun off into a company named Agilent, and then partially spun off again into a company named Keysight. At the time I bought my Rigol oscilloscope, I read a forum post by someone who had analyzed a firmware upgrade file for a contemporary Keysight oscilloscope. Inside it, he found the word "Rigol". In other words, at least one of the Keysight oscilloscopes was a rebranded Rigol product, or possibly Keysight was outsourcing the development of its firmware to Rigol. Either way, it was more evidence of the trend in that market.

But one thing in the South article gives me pause: "You take three photos, and they go to Southƒ??s cloud processing service and pick points to determine the offset on your mobile." That sounds like convenient, crowd-sourced intelligence-gathering for Beijing.

@james-fleming

That is a valid point.

Posted by: @bill-c

"You take three photos, and they go to Southƒ??s cloud processing service and pick points to determine the offset on your mobile." That sounds like convenient, crowd-sourced intelligence-gathering for Beijing.

Google earth seems like the ultimate intelligence gathering tool for any frenemy of the US but nobody seems to mention that.?ÿ

Keep in mind sometimes you're paying a higher price because the manufacturer is reinvesting some of the profits into research on other items. No research.....nothing for the Chinese to copy.?ÿ