BMG vs clone test

jens55

@DigiD, Thanks!

Corexy

I've never used a clone, but I have no problem paying for the original ON PRINCIPLE.

We all whine about jobs going over seas, but at the same time we want good pay...there's only one way that goes, higher prices but also better quality. The Duet boards are a classic example, also cloned by the way.

At them moment my life has been drastically changed, and my industry (Australian beef) was viciously attacked by China as a warning shot just for asking "what the fk happened?"

I'll give them as little as humanely possible until they lift their game. I don't think it's a cheap shot to mention the ethics of stolen IP, in fact it seems poor form not to acknowledge it.

When buying Chinese clones, you are buying STOLEN ideas executed poorly.

Any of us here would scream absolute blue murder if we invented something and went through all the drama and expense of bringing a product to market, only to have clones pop up everywhere. I'm sure we'd see it differently then.

jens55

@Corexy, I have no problems paying a reasonable price which is why my Duet stuff is original rather than clones. I do have a problem paying unreasonably inflated prices for the real McCoy.
Buying a clone does neccessarily mean stolen ideas. Duet being a perfect example - the design is open source and anyone is free to use it ---- not stolen (call it borrowed with permission)
I agree that I would be VERY unhappy if I had a product that was patented and it was cloned but I would not be surprised about clones if I sell a product that I can produce for $5 and I charge $200 for it retail. The chances of a clone being produced reduce drastically if I sell my $5 cost product for $50 instead of $200.
If China can't make a decent profit, they will not clone the product. Having said that, if I can produce an item for $5, chances are that China can produce it for $1 and they can sell it for $10 and still be quite happy.
Anyway, it is a never ending story and I don't see a real solution. You will always have areas that can produce stuff cheaper due to cheap labour or poor environmental practices or whatever. If not China then somebody else. On the other hand, if it wasn't for these cheap products, our lives would be totally different and not in a better way.
Let's start with a basic car to go from A to B costing $30k now. How would you feel if the same car cost $300K? While it would be great for the environment, it would totally screw up society.

zapta

@Corexy, there are several dimensions here, legality, morally, personal interests, and and national/local interests, that eventually contribute to a single buy/no-buy decision and like many things these day, it's complicated.

fma

In there book, "The Second Machine Age", Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee explain that chineese clones push people to always improve and innovate. By beeing a step ahead is the way to survive.

Look at E3D-online: despite the fact their products are probably the most cloned in the 3D printing market, they are still here, because they never stop producing new and better products.

fma

Mmm, I think I read that in Chris Anderson's book, "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution".

deckingman

@jens55 said in BMG vs clone test:

..................Let's start with a basic car to go from A to B costing $30k now. How would you feel if the same car cost $300K? While it would be great for the environment, it would totally screw up society.

For sure most of us can't afford $300k for (say) a Rolls Royce so we settle for the £30k jobby. But hey, the Chinese make rip off copies of everything - including cars. So one could buy a Lifan 320 for example which looks almost identical to a Mini Cooper but is a quarter of the price. It has an NCAP safety rating of zero but if you aren't too worried about whether yopu or any occupants would survive an accident, go for it. Mind you, the power output is only about 60% of the original but hey, they are cheap.

You might have a job getting hold of a Chinese car clone in your part of the world because most of them don't meet Western environmental or safety standards. Things like catalytic converters, ABS and air bags all add cost, so leaving them off gets the price down.

deckingman

@fma said in BMG vs clone test:

In there book, "The Second Machine Age", Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee explain that chineese clones push people to always improve and innovate. By beeing a step ahead is the way to survive.

Look at E3D-online: despite the fact their products are probably the most cloned in the 3D printing market, they are still here, because they never stop producing new and better products.

I think the opposite is true. For every company like E3D that has managed to survive, I could name dozens of other manufacturing businesses that have been forced to close due to cheap foreign copies of their designs. I'm of an age when I can remember all those companies which have gone, the premises have been demolished and replaced with car parks, out of town supermarkets, or shopping centres. With the loss of every company comes the loss of the skills of the people who used to work there which in turn stifles innovation. Why bother ploughing money into R&D if you won't be able to sell the end product at a cost which will re-coup that expenditure? Companies that simply steal other peoples' intellectual property will always be able to undercut a company that invests in R&D.

If we hadn't lost those companies and the skills of those workforces, what other innovative products might we now have?

dc42

Innovation does help to keep one step ahead, however our OEMs and resellers don't like us to change the product too often. OEMs want to be confident that the changes won't affect their product, and resellers don't want to be left with stock of old versions.

A very large part of our costs is firmware development. As well as me full time, we have two part-timers writing firmware and software. The cloners don't have these costs.

A further significant cost is testing our products to check whether they meet CE and other standards. This is very expensive because we have to use an external testing facility with a fully shielded room and all the right equipment. Usually our prototypes don't meet all the required standards first time, so we have to make changes and test again. Sometimes it takes several iterations to get it right. Every iteration means we have to make new prototypes (which itself is very expensive in small quantities) and pay for testing again. Cloners don't have these costs either.

And of course there is support, which is very important but takes a lot of time and more money.

jens55

@dc42, and yet your product is only marginally more expensive than the cloned product. There wasn't even a second thought spent on buying the original instead of a clone because your product provides much more value. Now if the Duet 3 was $3000 and the clone was $300, the question of value would have a different outcome. The real BMG is roughly 10 times the price of a clone.

zapta

@dc42, your second paragraph is more about business location than cloning vs innovation. A UK cloner would have to go through the certification while a CN innovator would not.

The CCP treats IP like bananas, growing on the trees and ready to be picked up. Duet3d and the rest of the developed world should do whatever they need to protect themselves, trade secrets, limited licenses, litigation, tariffs, sanctions, etc. We started to do it here on our side of the pond and hopefully UK and Europe would do the same. But for fairness, I think you also need to disclose to your customers which of your products are open sourced and which ones are not.

deckingman

My last business venture before I retired was designing and building garden decks. Being a "one man band" with my business premises consisting of an office in a spare bedroom and no other staff to pay wages to, my overheads were a lot lower than larger companies. But I would often get undercut on price and on average I landed about 1 job for every 3 quotations that I submitted. Not that it bothered me because I was always booked at least 3-6 months ahead and a lot of people didn't want to wait that long.

People would often say that they had a cheaper quote and sometimes ask if I could match it. My reply was always the same......

"Sure I can, getting the price down is the easiest thing in the world. I can use budget decking which is 22mm thick, and made out of Scotch Pine which doesn't come with any guarantee, rather than the 33mm thick premium decking made from Scandinavian Redwood which comes with a 25 year guarantee against rot or insect infestation. That will save £nnn. Or I can use plain rough sawn timber for the frame and posts rather than PAR tanalised timber and not bother treating the cut ends. That will save another £nnn. Again, that doesn't have any guarantee and will likely rot after 5 years or so, whereas the tanalised framing timber comes with the same 25 year guarantee. Or I can wack it all together with a nail gun rather than fixing it with exterior grade or stainless steel steel screws. That will save another £nnn but the nails will likley spring as the timber expands and contracts, and those that don't will rust away so the deck will warp and twist before it falls apart completely in a few years time. Or I can not bother with the heavy duty weed suppression fabric. That will save another £nnn. etc etc. Which of those options would you like me to amend the quote for?"

Funnily enough, they invariably ended up going with the original quote.

zapta

@deckingman, from the way you describe it, it seems that you didn't really want to let the customers to decide and made the decision for them. Smart customers can easily pick these vibes.

Every market has a room for products at different price/quality/performance, including the UK decking market and the desktop 3D printing market.

deckingman

@zapta It's true that I would try my best to explain to customers that cheap materials would shorten the life of their deck to one fifth of what it could otherwise be and cost them more money in the longer term. It made no financial difference to me because the labour cost was the same, so my profit was the same regardless of the quality of the materials.
For sure, many customers went the cheap route (with a different supplier) and of course, that was their choice. But I didn't mind because much of my business was replacing decks that had been built cheaply. So I knew that I would likely get the work in a few years time. But that would cost the customer more in the long term so I felt I had a duty to point that out.
Interestingly, competitors used to come and go. Most would be gone within a year of starting up. Probably because it's difficult to make a living when you spend half the time going back to rectify previous f**k ups. Whereas I was always booked for at least 3 to 6 months and always had more work than I could handle.

whopping pochard

@deckingman I had always wondered about your handle!

We are in the process of rebuilding the deck we tore out from our house. It not only rotted away into a hazard in under ten years since the previous owner built it, it took the sill beam where they’d attached it (with no flashing) with it. Great fun!

deckingman

@whopping-pochard said in BMG vs clone test:

@deckingman I had always wondered about your handle!

We are in the process of rebuilding the deck we tore out from our house. It not only rotted away into a hazard in under ten years since the previous owner built it, it took the sill beam where they’d attached it (with no flashing) with it. Great fun!

Yes, it's a long story - that was career number 7 (or 8 ) but I'm an engineer by training. Feel free to PM me if you need any advice.
For info, I never used to attach anything to existing structures. If the deck needed to abut a wall, I made it so the frame would finish about 100mm away from the wall (the deck would be supported on posts set onto concrete pads). Then the deck planks would extend up to but not quite touching the wall (about a 3-5mm gap between the deck planks and the wall). So plenty of room for air to circulate and no chance of water getting trapped between any timber and an existing structure. A slight fall away from the wall, ensured that there was no possibility of damp ingress into the wall from the deck (we get a lot of rain in this part of the world).

Veti

i bought a titan clone off amazon. when i assembled it i was like, do they even know what this thing is supposed to be doing. I got my money back without much fuss and got to keep the useless titan.
i ended up printing a new cases for it and was able to use the gears.

lately the quality coming from china has increases in quality by a lot. i.e the skr boards are really good boards.

zapta

@Veti said in BMG vs clone test:

china has increases in quality by a lot...

They work their way up the quality ladder as the Japanese and the South Koreans did. After WWII Japanese products were considered cheap junk and then the Korean. Now they are recognized for quality in many areas.

China's population is ~1B and has an average IQ higher than any European or North/South American country.