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Comment by Phelinofist | Hacker News Reader

> was sold to a German company... So, it’s not really surprising that it stagnated

As a German I _really_ feel this

Same here. Minor iterative engineering innovation has been the main theme for years in Germany. Somehow hoping for a wakeup call, but it is hard to be optimistic these days.

Not a tech company, but I feel strongly about this when it comes to LAMY (a fountain pen company). As far as I can tell their pens (notably the Safari and 2000) have stayed almost exactly the same for the past 40 years!

The only thing they tweak in these pens are the limited edition colors, which for the Safari they're releasing probably 3+ per year. I once met a guy who had a collection of over 50 Safari pens so I guess that market works out for them…

on the other hand, I am curious as to what the perception is of technical improvements in fountain pens in the past 40 years that they are not following?

This is exactly one example I had in mind. I visited LAMY about 8yrs ago as we were paid by local government to consult local companies for AI and data analytics applications. While I was deeply impressed by the value creation depth at LAMY, it was also crazy how anachronistic the operation was.

I associate “German engineering” mostly with Dieselgate nowadays. German-made tools are still excellent, but even there companies like Rösle or Vogel quietly moved production to China or India.

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