> But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.
Why? A year is a long time and it's a solved problem. In any case even if you allow the "a year is not enough" argument why didn't they start 5 years ago?
Why? A year is a long time and it's a solved problem. In any case even if you allow the "a year is not enough" argument why didn't they start 5 years ago?
You don’t know that vertical integration will guarantee that you’re more competitive, and the investment you need to make before you see a return is beyond 5 years. That’s not an easy bet to make. It looks obvious in retrospect, but it’s really not.
It requires quite a bit of in-housing that many of these teams aren’t yet well-versed in, so as you vertically integrate you’re also disrupting your internal structure while adding new people. It’s a lot to take on. Meanwhile, there are other long term plans underway already.
Of course on itself it may not help, but along with other tricks like going agile with hardware does the job pretty well.
While others are doing their hardware iterations that last for years, software defined stuff may be easier.
Unless the top of the company comes in and starts chopping every head that gets in the way of the new paradigm then it just ends up in locked up meetings for years of people that don't want to change.
Electronics integration isn't the problem, the people currently there are.
The time to go and implement such a change probably pales in comparison to the amount of time spent in meetings getting people to agree to make the change.
https://www.hwe.design/product-development-process/developme...
For components that have many components or complex requirements, or are part of more complicated systems, this takes longer. Cars have a design cycle that's many years long - 5-6 years would be a decent ballpark. That's due to the complexity of the product, complexity of the supply chains and tooling, requirements, and scale.
It's because these companies are more about vendor management and regulatory compliance than building things. It's a totally different mindset.