Comment by robinsoh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robinsoh | Hacker News Reader

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> You might do better to speak to that accusation directly.

That's the thing. I'm trying to figure out exactly what the accusation is. So far, every time I've challenged comments made about this, people have been vague and unwilling to state anything verifiable. To be frank, I don't even think any of the people making those comments are actually display people.

> Maybe the eink lads believe the tech can never scale beyond niche, won't take off, so are just milking the market at the highest licensing fees they can get?

I don't even know what the meaning of "eink licenses their technology" would mean. That's way too vague. It would be the equivalent of saying "Samsung Displays licenses their technology". All I know is that Eink sells electrophoretic FPL and then their various partners produce things using that FPL. You can buy miles of their FPL if you want for dollars per yard or something like that. You can drive it using your own tech, laminate whatever backplane you want to it. What I know for sure is the high volume displays like the ones that go into Kindles are cheap, and everything else is like 10x more expensive simply because they're so low volume they might as well be hand assembled.

The explicit accusation, AFAICT, is that eInk holds certain patent(s) which cannot be avoided if you want to produce an electrophoretic-technology display panel yourself; and so people believe eInk are, through these patents, “strangling the market for innovation.”

They believe that, without those patents (or if those patents were instead in the public domain), companies that produce traditional display panels (like yours!) would be competitively iterating on electrophoretic display-panel technology in the process of manufacturing their own to sell into the market (either vertically-integrated, or as panel wholesalers), the same way they competitively iterate on LCD and LED-based display panel technologies; and that this would presumably produce market efficiencies that aren’t currently there.

There could also be vertically-integrated niche panel+display companies focusing on niche use-cases, targeting a given vertical and doing “market education” for that vertical, creating demand for e.g. electrophoretic billboards, that isn’t currently there, “inventing the market” for themselves where each of these niches can eventually be a high-volume product of its own.

And that would in turn drive additional innovation, as each of these companies would have a healthy margin to plow back into R&D.

I think the intuitional belief behind this is that the blocking factor from this virtuous cycle beginning, is the fact that the entrepreneurs considering starting these niche companies, and the display bigcorps considering getting into this space, both consider that — when per-device patent licensing costs are included — the market is too low-margin to bother entering, even to chase a greenfield vertical. It only becomes “worth it” without the licensing fees.

People’s intuition for this probably leans on analogies like the market for CPU innovation heating up again now that Apple has got away from relying on Intel and is producing their own CPUs. People would intuit that if display manufacturers could “get away from eInk” and “produce their own electrophoretic panels”, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” market would “heat up.”

> The explicit accusation, AFAICT, is that eInk holds certain patent(s) which cannot be avoided if you want to produce an electrophoretic-technology display panel yourself

They don't hold such a patent, at least as far as I know. Which is presumably how their competitors like ClearInk, Reinkstone are able to be in business.

> so people believe eInk are, through these patents, “strangling the market for innovation.”

I don't understand why someone would believe that, especially people who aren't involved in the industry. As I mentioned, it would be the equivalent of me believing that Google was strangling the market of innovation in search engines and that Microsoft is strangling the market for innovation in operating systems. Although now that I think deeper about the line about Microsoft, maybe Microsoft is doing that? Is that why desktop Linux has not progressed at all and remains unusable?

> People would intuit that if display manufacturers could “get away from eInk” and “produce their own electrophoretic panels”, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” market would “heat up.”

Eink is considered a niche player in my industry. It would be the equivalent of perhaps a ultralowpower CPU manufacturer in the CPU industry. In my opinion, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” is not going to happen using electrophoretics because the physics of the problem is too challenging. In my opinion, the main reason why nothing is really happening there is because doing fundamental research on display technologies is expensive. Bezos spent hundreds of millions on Liquavista before he killed it, I'm pretty sure Qualcomm spent a lot on Mirasol. The problem is VCs don't want to invest in hard problems. They can get a quicker return from yet another internet service, AI/ML, another airbnb, another uber, another payment gateway and so on.

> They don't hold such a patent, at least as far as I know. Which is presumably how their competitors like ClearInk, Reinkstone are able to be in business.

They do seem to hold rather a lot of patents (https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation), though I don't have the domain knowledge to know whether any of these are "unavoidable" in the domain in the way that e.g. software engineering process patents tend to be.

Perhaps their competitors actually license some of them? Or are in a patent pooling arrangement?

> It would be the equivalent of me believing that Google was strangling the market of innovation in search engines

I mean, with the PageRank patent, they... sort of were?

Nobody could come up with anything nearly as optimal as Google's approach for a long time, let alone more optimal; the next-best algorithms were way less good. And so we didn't see any real Google Search competitors — competitors competing on index quality against Google — after Google came into the market. (There's still nobody with a better raw index than Google's, AFAIK.)

The original PageRank patent expired in 2015. A lot of advancement in the search space happened in 2015! Bing got a lot better, for one. Guess why? :)

(Of course, companies that were somewhat immune to America's WIPO power — e.g. the government-backed conglomerates of China/Russia — have just been using PageRank or algorithms analogous to it in their web search services since the beginning. It was only the, er, NATO-member-country web-search-engine market that effectively stalled out.)

> They do seem to hold rather a lot of patents (https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation), though I don't have the domain knowledge to know whether any of these are "unavoidable" in the domain in the way that e.g. software engineering process patents tend to be.

Some of those patents like the one about dual substrate TFT seem vaguely broad to me, but it doesn't even seem to be a display technology related patent to me. In fact it seems to be about microfluidics which is an abandoned area of research in display technology, at least in the commercial sense. As for "a lot of patents", just how many patents would you expect a company to have? How long has eInk been in business? 20 years? 30 years? I think I first heard of them in 2000s so at least 20 years it seems like.

More importantly, why would we assume anything perverse is happening? My point is that HN commenters seemed to have a strong foundational belief (as shown by the original comment I responded to) that something perverse was happening. OP was effectively claiming that eInk would try to stop this electrochromic nanostructure display tech from succeeding, and now that I've challenged that claim, I don't see any OP or anyone else provide any sort of factual basis for it. So if you'll allow me, doesn't it kind of sound like a bunch of software guys shitting on a niche display company that failed to achieve their lofty desires?

As a display guy, can I just say I have perhaps analogous despair at how terrible the software for everything I do on a daily basis is. I'm forced to reboot my desktop pretty much on a monthly basis. PLC controls that suck. Interfaces that are so horrible. Is that all Google's fault? Microsoft's fault? Is it all due to patent trolls? Who do I get to blame? You guys tell me please.

Google and Microsoft are used by billions, why not eInk, is the question we're asking.

> Google and Microsoft are used by billions, why not eInk, is the question we're asking.

I don't understand the comparison between a search engine, an OS , and a niche low power display component. I had brought up Google and Microsoft as examples to prove that holding many many patents is not an unusual thing for companies to do. Also, who is "we"? The context I was originally responding to was the insinuation that eInk or its partners or some unknown consortium of patent poolers (alleged above) was an evil patent troll that was blocking progress in the display industry and was going to prevent this electrochromic nanostructure display from being successful.

As a fellow display engineer, thank you.

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