Posted by Wayne Parham [ 64.216.177.147 ] on October 30, 2004 at 16:00:31:
In Reply to: Re: Competitive edge posted by manualblock on October 30, 2004 at 15:37:25:
What gets me is when you can get away with it, that's one thing but when the competition is strong, you can't. American products in the 50's and 60's were the best, but by the seventies, they weren't. American companies realized that by 1985 or so, and the car market gradually pulled out by doing some catch up on R&D and eventually making some really fine automobiles. But the electronics industry never recovered, with exception of computers.
So forgetting about politics or trade unions, even free trade capitalism sets the bar here. If a company's product isn't as good as its competition, it is at a disadvantage. The company can sell on reputation and cultivated image, but that fades quick when its product gets stomped. That doesn't happen very quickly because people are slow to change and move out of their comfort zones. But when a trend starts, it usually snowballs. Maybe in the past, a company could hang on to the status quo for a few years, but today, it cannot. So I think that sitting smugly on an old product in a technology oriented market is not good.
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