Most of time I yap about tech and manufacturing so let's dabble a bit in economics today
Why do we buy a certain product instead of any of its competitors?
Most of the times we buy something because there's a value proposition to it. Where it provides
• same value as others but at reduced cost; or
• comparatively more value at a close price.
We can definitely make something like this but the more important question is would we be able to exploit any of the above propositions?
• Whoever takes the initiative gets a first mover's advantage which ultimately translates to economies of scale resulting in them making their products extremely cost effective. And this deters new entrants as they can't compete by providing the same values as their cost would be too high because they need to account for their fixed cost too, which older firms have amortized long ago and now more or less just needs to bother about the variable cost.
• So providing same value at a lower cost is not possible hence the only option left is providing more values at a slightly more cost. This can be done in two ways; one, you make the customer think that you're providing more values by using gimmicks. This is something you'd find in mid-range smartphone category where they use all kind of gibberish like "Beast Mode 2.3/UltraCool/69MP camera" to differentiate their phones from the competition because at its core a FakeMe and a BlueMi are pretty much the same value at the same cost. But these don't work much in aerospace and defence where everything is judged on their performance and not gimmicks, so here comes the second way; innovation. You try to come up with something so radical that it "breaks" the cost-value proposition.
tl;dr: If I try to match the price of this ComTac then my quality would suffer and if try to match its quality then my price would rise. Only way to best this paradox is if I innovate something that lets me drive down the price drastically compared to the quality or something that's groundbreaking in terms of technology like say a bone conducting ComTac with active noise cancellation.
