Re: Why are TI Calcs so inferior?
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Re: Why are TI Calcs so inferior?
This discussion has been really interesting but maybe a lot of you are
missing an important point.
Basically, for TI to justify increasing the cost of a calculator by
even a few cents, their economics guys will calculate how much more or
less total profit ti will get by making the change. I'll spare the
equations and just say this:
How many people are there who would have bought a ti calculator, but
bought some other brand calculator because that other calculator was
faster?
I believe that ti's research indicates "not many" as the answer. TI
already dominates the market, and no HP or casio or sharp brand
calculators are so much faster than the ti calculators that I hear
people say "Boy, I was gonna get that ti because it's easier to use and
everyone else at school has one and my teacher to told me to get it, but
now that I've seen how fast this casio graphs my parabola, I'm hooked."
Furthermore, calculations made on actual data that ti has will show that
there is a minimum number of new calculators ti must sell to be better
off after upgrading the calculators than it is now. For example, if ti
spends a lot of money to pay engineers to redesign the ti85, and then
makes the new calculator better and it costs more to make, then Ti had
better sell more than, say, 10 additional units over what they would
have sold with no redesign or they'll have lost some profit. (They can
also raise the price but doing so will reduce the number of units TI
sells....)
Anyway, economic principles (qualitatively) show that TI is currently
making as much profit as it can due to the length of time that TI had
been in the buisness and other factors. So TI has no incentive to
upgrade its calculators.
Note that TI is owned by its shareholders (people who own TI stock),
and all they care about is whether they're making more money off the TI
stock than if they sold the TI stock and used it to buy HP stock (or
microsloth or whatever). TI execs have to be careful that they are as
sure as possible that a change in an already successful calculator line
increases TI's profitability or there'll be hell to pay. Sorry, but no
super-calculators until market conditions require that TI either make
super-calculators or get out of the industry.
-Jonathan
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