WernerD
Captain
Flight distance : 350837 ft
Austria
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Working in the software industry myself, my input would be....
There are two kinds of innovations
- Evolutional ("Kaizen") where you take a system and optimize it by a little in high frequently. The DJI App would be a good example - adding a minor piece here, fixing a little bug there.
- Disruptive innovation where you had a great idea which needs a lot of changes and likely different hardware.
Another aspect is How you develop something
- As a brand new product from ground - no ties hence but it will take time until you are feature complete
- Continous development - you reuse stuff that exists already and improve. Hence more reliable, faster and less expensive.
The third aspect is a long term vision
- 20 years ago we would have developed a vision, then an architecture and then started with the implementation. The first 2 parts took multiple years already in order to be perfect. But by then the product idea had been obsolote.
- Today there is the tendency to focus on a single use case, implement that and then be surprised when reality kicks in and your use case starts to change - you not being prepared for that.
- Best is obviously a mixture of the two, spend some time on a long term vision in order to be aware of the most obvious things and incorporate them into your architecture (not neccessarily implement them from start but allow for it later).
A good compromise for all the above is Modularity. Let's take DJI for example:
There are the components camera, gimbal, drone body, drone electronics. While most companies separate the four components into four modules, DJI sees camera and gimbal as one unit, drone body & electronics as the second. There are a lot of design interdependencies between camera and gimbal, e.g. masses, center of gravity, dimensions. Makes perfect sense.
As a result, we have two modules and the interface between those two is critical. And that is where DJI is starting to make mistakes.
DJI Ronin-M: A superbe gimbal. Guess what, people want to mount it on rigs like a cablecam, spidecam, crane, drone, tripod. An obvious future use case but the design does not allow for that as the gimbal does neither provide feedback for its current position nor allows for absolute movements ("look 90° to the right"). All it allows is realtive movements - move with a speed of 10°/s to the right and I keep controling the angle manually.
DJI Inspire 2 is the same thing: You have the Inspire 2 with the new cameras at an exorbitant price. And the Inspire 1 is still a good bird. The most logical thing would be to mount a Inspire 2 camera on an inspire 1 bird for a starter. Is there anything that prevents that? Okay, SDCard, SSD and electronics went into the bird instead of being in the camera, so yes. But would it have been a problem to provide e.g. an adapter plate that contains that for the I1? I would think it is doable. And soon people will want to upgrade to the I2 bird for longer flight times, yet with just two components you could serve a much wider audience: I1 with X4s as entry; I1 with X5S; I2 with X5(R); I2 with X5S.
Instead today you have to go all the way to the I2 with its cameras and that is quite a price tag.
DJI Inspire 2 Batteries are another good example: Nobody thought at the I1 development about a dual battery concept. No problem. Experience showed that quite a few I1s fell out of the sky because the battery turned itself off to protect itself. (Okay, now the battery is broken because it fell out of the sky instead of being deep discarded) Can you build a dual battery system with existing batteries? Certainly not, hence you have to change it. Accepted.
But DJI fails even on the most basic task - the maintance of the Go App and fimware - which speaks for itself.
None of that is a problem for DJI at the moment. But it leaves the door wide open for competitors to gain market share. At the moment there are none. Exactly as there were no competitors in the automobile area as nobody can quickly develop a new car and produce it in masses. An attitude that allowed Tesla to pop up.
My point is, all these decisions will hurt DJI longterm. Shortterm it is just a little less revenue - if that - but longterm it prepares the seed for competitors to grow.
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