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I Don`t Understand What Minelab Is Doing


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Never mind that Minelab rubbish, get a real detector ? 2cd8pkg.jpg

Found under 500k power lines.

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14 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

Minelab the people and Minelab the corporation are two different things.  A corporation is a different beast however, and has a separate life of its own. A true separate legal life, and corporate behavior is distinctly separate from that of the individuals that make it up.  (Long term success) is a matter of looking at the customers side. That is a key to business... paying attention to customer concerns. It does no service to Minelab to downplay or repress those concerns. They do not have to be logical or make any sense. Customers want what they want and any company would be wise to remember that.

I cut out some of this paragraph to make my point.  Let's look at the landscape.  Lots of companies build Induction Balance detectors (IB, the correct term, which unfortunately has evolved into VLF -- a special case of IB, but I'm getting off topic...).  Minelab certainly has some excellent entries in that market, but they have competition.

On the Pulse Induction (PI) playing field, many companies have salt water versions (even Tesoro!) but for the dry land versions, Minelab has been the leader for a couple decades.  They're expensive and heavy (much of that weight is the battery needed to deliver those energetic pulses) but the consumers lap them up.

Minelab has the only Zero Voltage Transmission (ZVT) detector.  It's the most expensive metal detector by far, and it also is popular as hell.  When I took Gerry McMullen's gold detector training class last November more than half of the attendees had GPZ7000's.

When Minelab announced the Equinox (IB detector) 22 months ago the community couldn't stop talking about it, and still hasn't.  Now they're playing the same game with the Vanquish (IB detector), with similar response.

The corporate side of Minelab (Codan?) apparently only cares about one thing -- maximizing profit for shareholders.  I don't think this attitude is unusual in the equity world.  The only reason they care about the consumer is if it affects their stock price.  The reception of Equinox and now (so far) the Vanquish aren't doing a damn thing to change their minds.  They're toasting their ability to coerce the public into supporting and then buying anything they (actually their engineers and marketers) dangle at the end of a stick.  They have the midas touch, at least for now.

Minelab/Codan is the big fish in a small pond.  (Are they the only publically traded metal detector company?)  They're like Microsoft was (kinda still is) for decades.  We love to hate them on our way to buying their latest product.  Writing letters is unlikely to make any difference.  Only competition can change things.  We can vow to buy their competitors' products as soon as those become available.  Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be happening quickly enough, yet.  We continue to reward Minelab/Codan for their overweight (in most cases), expensive (in most cases), minimally accessorized (in many cases) models by voting with our wallets.  They continue to party at their board meetings at our expense.

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And also like Microsoft, Minelab has patents to a lot of stuff that will prevent any competitors from emerging in the future too so that they can continue letting corporate goals (always shareholder profits, when is not?) drive the business in the wider scope of things that make it to board level. So, I wouldn't be holding my breath. :biggrin:

Corporate climates are almost always a decaying orbit into making the quickest, cheapest buck even with people among them trying to drive innovation.

I invented something when I worked in the oilfield but I lacked the money to build it. The company I worked for flew me to Houston HQ where I was able to meet with their team of physicists and engineers in the R&D dept. There was a "Bruce Candy" of this particular company who listened to my idea and took me to lunch. The minute he sat down he told me he didn't hear anything I said, we never talked about the idea, and I should fly back home early and forget about it until I quit the company and pursue it on my own. Otherwise he'd be forced to patent it.

Why? Because he said their job isn't to build things, it's to patent things so the competition can't build it. It's cheaper to do that and force customers to pay top dollar for old tools then to constantly create new ones which still only get the same day rate, and guess which business model the shareholders prefer?

Welcome to corporate stagnation and the end stage of capitalism.

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12 minutes ago, Swegin said:

That just might be true.

 

Going back over the PI years, I believe it isn`t just a maybe, ML just are not good at making coils, whatever held them back in that department 20 plus years ago still is, cannot be skill has to be simply their attitude. I can understand them not letting a product out that they believe isn`t "up to scratch", but that`s just an excuse, as no product has been made that some think is not up to scratch. The GPZ being a fine example, how many have tried it and gone back to the Xs.

Steve your opinion is gold on here, and I am sure that`s not just my opinion.

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I’ve done nothing ever but defend the engineers at all the companies. They are the good guys in my book. In my mind at least I figure they get as frustrated as any of us by decisions they see being made up the corporate ladder. I say that as a guy that has sat on a corporate board for decades and still does. Maximizing shareholder value does not always coincide with customer interests. Anyone that thinks it’s all about the customer does not know how a corporation really works.

Ah well, just a grumpy old codger having one last go at trying to rattle a companies cage. :laugh:  It is a habit developed over a couple decades of trying to advocate for the consumer side of things. It’s a little hard letting go but I had my day and scored a few wins and need to be content with that. It will be interesting to see where the industry goes from here. The technology is entering a great new phase of rapid innovation and prices finally coming down so all is well. We have more and better choices than ever, and the next ten years are going to be amazing from a technology standpoint. Minelab will no doubt drive most of that but we can always hope somebody rises to the challenge and surprises with something out of left field. I won’t hold my breath though. The U.S. manufacturers in particular continue to disappoint. It’s kind of sad that I feel like I have to hang my hopes on an upstart company from Turkey offering Minelab any serious competition.

I read a lot of philosophy these days. Here is a favorite I am working on.....

“You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

 

 

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Bottom line:

We have been patient/impatient and quiet about coils for a long time to be added to the 7000.  It is now time to be impatient and vocal and see if that gets better results!

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2 hours ago, jasong said:

I invented something when I worked in the oilfield but I lacked the money to build it. The company I worked for flew me to Houston HQ where I was able to meet with their team of physicists and engineers in the R&D dept. There was a "Bruce Candy" of this particular company who listened to my idea and took me to lunch. The minute he sat down he told me he didn't hear anything I said, we never talked about the idea, and I should fly back home early and forget about it until I quit the company and pursue it on my own. Otherwise he'd be forced to patent it.

Why? Because he said their job isn't to build things, it's to patent things so the competition can't build it. It's cheaper to do that and force customers to pay top dollar for old tools then to constantly create new ones which still only get the same day rate, and guess which business model the shareholders prefer?

That cracks me up, Jason.  But it is true many times.  For a while I took a job at my company as a mechanical engineer in our legal department.  My sole job was to expand on existing patents and the competition's patents because millions can be lost just on intellectual property.  Now, I don't think every engineer's job is to just patent things.  This was a poorly made statement.  A good engineer does both. 

But moving on, the engineer has very little say on the direction a company goes towards. As others have mentioned, marketing tends to be the ruler in this arena.

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After having looked at this whole thread, Ive seen 2 glaring gaps in the posts, and from my own perspective they need to be said. I watched a good coil technician build a 10" GPZ coil way back in 2017. He deconstructed a 14" ML coil, worked out the parameters, made a patch block (not a lead, coz he was only doing bench testing at the time) and built 4 prototypes of varying merit until he built one that worked really well and was field tested extensively. THIS TOOK HIM 2 WEEKS......one man. On a technical standpoint, there is zero excuse for ML NOT to be able to build numerous designs OR give the task to either of the major coil players in Oz OR at least another 4 guys who are known to be top notch coil technicians. Indeed, both of the big players are logically rumored to have made several GPZ coil prototypes in the past couple years for just such a time. Again, NO EXCUSES.  OK, 1st statement made.

2nd statement, and another really obvious one, a large coil selection SELLS DETECTORS. The more variable and adaptable a detector is, the more likely it is to be sold. At this stage in the GPZ's life-span anyone with a logical view of the detector industry should glaringly see that leftover warehouse/floor stock of GPZ's would sell better with more coil selection. With the GPZ about to be replaced, this would be an obvious time for ML  to 'allow' coils to be made. I wish I could afford to buy a GPZ just so I could join in now.....

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Obviously I haven't been paying attention to all this for the years you guys have, but I've dealt with many companies over the years. It's like minelab has never heard of customer relations and has nobody assigned to the job. There has been a group of extremely loyal customers on here frustrated for the entire time I've been here and not one single word out of minelab, unless we count Jonathan. That's just weird.  

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