Re: Im confuzzled
[Is that still a plausible claim (in comparing commodity vs niche, or even consumables vs assets) these days?]
[A company designing and buying on the scale of Samsung gets to influence things, and they get to influence them to change every few months too. What small(ish)-scale designer/buyer can influence COTS suppliers to stay compatible over a few years?]
Lots of points made. Note that I'm not claiming that a small manufacturer can influence COTS. In the case of the niche area (TETRA), note that it isn't COTS and the relatively low volumes mean that the handset manufacturers have to build a platform that is configurable and will last many years - you have to be able to amortise the capex over the lifetime of the model. The relatively specialised components for TETRA radios (narrowband, tight tolerance) mean that each manufacturer is likely to have built long terms relationships with their suppliers that they will have some, possibly quite deep, relationship with . Also, Public Safety users tend to appreciate handsets that work even if they have been run over by a car or spent an hour or so in a burning building, so trust/brand counts for a lot. I understand from FOI requests that TETRA handsets get sold by the manufacturers for under GBP300
In the case of a volume consumer manufacturer (e.g. Samsung) that makes more phones in a day than two year's worth of European public safety handset supply, why are they going to redesign a chassis or request a public-safety specific component modification that would necessarily apply to nearly all handsets if it put more than $0.10 on the cost of the device - which would immediately be $30M off the bottom line.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
