By MeSoHordey
Thu Sep 24, 2009 1:10 am
Ill-Green wrote:All I can say, its just a drum machine. I still haven't saw it sample from a record or a cd and see the sample chopped and flipped.
Ok so the Kangz craft the sounds in the Thang. What y'all should of done was sell the Thang without the 3,000 sounds and reduce it to 500 sounds, so the price will be lower to $499. maybe? And then the profits will be made with sample packs. Let the user choose to fill the other 2500 slots with their own or the premade Kangz sounds. Yeah.
I agree with you, if you're talking about us as a target market. But I think I might know why they can't.
Assume Hardware R&D is $1M, Sound development is $500,000 and that each unit costs $500 to produce whether sounds are included or not.
- - With sounds, and at an MSRP of $1,000, BKE has to sell 3,000 units in order to break even on their original investment of $1.5M.
- - Without sounds, and at an MSRP of $599.00 BKE has to sell 10,000 units. And they have to explain to their customers* why they can't use it out of the box.
*Jamon was on to something earlier. AKAI can get away with selling their units for $1,000 with NO sounds because their target market (US) goes beyond casual hobbyists. BKE can't; the kiddies need the sounds in order to get started and BKE, quite frankly, BKE needs the built-in additional margin that sounds create.
BTW - I don't believe for a second that R&D on this unit was a $1M. They say that back in the early nineties when Jeff Hawkins went to create a simple plastic prototype of the Palm Pilot, he was quoted around a $1M. I wouldn't be surprised if BKE has put $5-$10M into R&D. So basically at an MSRP of $1,000 they need to sell 20,000 units in order to recover their investment.
That's a lot of frickin units.
Sometimes I still laugh out loud about the beat kangz and that time some English dude hacked the Akai marketing website and stole a bunch of pictures of the Ren before it was released.
