Comment by robinsoh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robinsoh | Hacker News Reader

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> e-ink displays and 3d printing have both convinced me that patents do more harm than good these days.

I work in the display industry. Not for E Ink. But I have no idea what you're talking about. I see this claim about patents on e-ink repeated again and again. I don't know much about 3d printing so I can't confirm. But each time I've seen this patent claim about e-ink, I ask the poster/commenter what specific patent or patents or data they're talking about and thus far every single time they either go silent or get defensive or in rare occasions acknowledge they didn't know about it and just "felt" it was the case. So could you help me out and explain what data convinced you? You can see my comment history to see all my attempts to try to get at what is the actual truth.

FYI, in my experience in the display industry, the main driver of price at scale is the asymptotic cost of components and materials like TFT backplanes, glue, passive layers, coatings, Indium Tin Oxide. Low volumes are what all of E Inks displays except the ones made for Amazon. That matches up with what I see in the prices.

This gets into a chicken and egg argument. You are arguing that the level of demand is leading to the current price point, while complainers about E Ink argue that anti competitive practices lead to higher prices which results in a lower demand.

In a competitive market, both are actually true. The fact that there aren't really any major competitors to E Ink in that market indicates however that there probably is some sort of moat (whether it is IP, or otherwise)and that prices are likely higher than they would be in a more competitive market. There are a lot of signs that there is latent demand in the market and lowered prices would lead to an increase in total market volume.

> The fact that there aren't really any major competitors to E Ink in that market indicates however that there probably is some sort of moat (whether it is IP, or otherwise)and that prices are likely higher than they would be in a more competitive market.

I don't know what exactly you mean in the context of the display industry. What do you mean there aren't any major competitors to E Ink? There's tonnes of display products from lots of different vendors. Are you talking about the electrophoretic display industry specifically? If so, then even there there's competitors like ClearInk but its a niche space with low volumes. FYI, the volumes that E Ink reaches even for what is considered "high volume" by them would be considered unacceptably low volume by LCD manufacturers. Ask yourself a simple question. Are you as a VC going to invest a billion into scaling up an electrophoretic display tech startup that may take 10-30 years or would you rather pump that same money into another internet services? Even Amazon pumped billions into Liquavista and then pulled the plug on it after not being able to scale within the time frame Jeff had given them.

> that prices are likely higher than they would be in a more competitive market.

But how are you substantiating that? Do you have awareness of the costs of materials for electrophoretic panels? Are you aware of yield rates? I actually work in the display industry and I have no actual data on that and I would never be able to estimate even order of magnitude cost without knowing those key numbers. So how are you doing making that price estimation? Your claim is equivalent of looking at a sports car market and saying Ferraris would be cheaper if there were more competitors. I hope my explanation is clear enough to convince you of the fundamental flaws in the arguments being made claiming there is "some sort of moat".

Are you in the US? Is there a display industry in the US for getting backplanes?

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