Hacker News Reader

Comment by dtnewman | Hacker News Reader

I’m not utterly opposed to this regulation, but I do think SawStop stands to benefit. Even if the patents are open, it will take competitors a long time to develop new products. Meanwhile, SawStop will get the distribution that they don’t currently have. Just glancing at the HomeDepot website, I see that they sell SawStop but they are not stocked at my local store. I imagine that if this goes through, every Physical store in the country will need to stock their saws, at least until their competitors put out products. in the meantime, they can get much better economies of scale, and then try to compete on price

View on HN

Bosch already has these table saws ready and available for jobsite-type of saws, they are sold in Canada I think. Techtronic Industries (Milwaukee, Ryobi) and Stanley Black & Decker (DeWalt) are huge enough to just push through and it will filter to all the brands they manufacture. Delta is smaller, but this is their bread and butter so probably they have some technology lying in wait.

The higher end table saws is probably a different story, they are even smaller manufacturers, but a lot of that stuff is different anyway.

Bosch pulled their saws from the market. Speculation is that they were unreliable or posed some sort of liability risk.

Usually these types of laws come with a date in the future that they will actually be implemented giving such competitors time to figure these things out.

Yeah, i looked at the proposal in more depth and it proposes 36 months from publication until the rule takes effect [1]. That does seem like a lot of time (the proposal itself notes that this is longer than usual).

I guess the benefit to SawStop is that they sell a better product, but turns out most people won't pay 2-3x the price for the added benefit. If they can make everyone implement the same feature, then they still probably won't compete on price, but the price difference will go down, and perhaps people will pay a low to medium premium for a slightly better safety mechanism.

As far as regulatory capture goes, it doesn't sound particularly nefarious. I do believe that the folks at SawStop genuinely believe this is necessary regulation.

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-23898/p-145

There are competing systems both international and domestic that have been forced off the shelves by sawstop.

It's not outrageous that a business's investors are rewarded for an innovation that benefits humanity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com