Yamaha did do their homework Diki! They researched the market before they spent millions on producing a keyboard to the market. They know who their core customers are, what they will be prepared to pay for their keyboards, what size and weight they are sensitive to , what colours they like best, whether their customers want a sampler on the keyboard,what kind of voices/patches/tones they want on the instrument how many keys they want on their keyboard , and they fully understand the product life cycle of their instruments and how often their customers are willing to buy another keyboard. Any company that has targeted its customers must have some idea of why they have aimed their product at a particular market.

They may pick up some other customers too like pro gigging musicians, weekend warriors who only play out on the occasional weekends and odd balls like me who use them for church and personal pleasure.

But the extras ae not the target market.

The very fact that you havent changed your keyboard in the last 8-10 years means YOU DONT FIT the typical arranger customer profile of any company much less yamaha and therefore you are not nor are you ever likely to be their target market ! How will yamaha make money out of you ??? Your purchase cycle is too long !!

It isnt a matter of yamaha or korg or ketron making a product and just hoping somebody will like it . They wil have had a very good idea of who would buy and in the numbers they need to make a convincing argument for them to invest and take the risks that TTG accepts there are in any business venture. What both you and TTG missed out is that companies also target profit !

I know this is a shock to you.

They have a number that they aim for called a return on investment.Its usually express as a multiple of the capital expenditure. If they dont think they can get that number , they wont invest. End of argument. It doesnt matter if you think they can make a profit if that profit isnt in the numbers they need in terms of the ROI.

That profit figure will differ from company to company.

As an illustration ,when i first went into business i chased every sale. I worked from home ,was very hungry and ambitious but did not have the business savy of some of my contemporaries. They would chase bigger clients or more lucrative type sales , they employed telemarkers to make appointments for them and had paraplanners doing their paperwork for them. They had overheads that were equal to my monthly salary before they even started to earn But they were part of the Million dollar round table. An elite group of salesmen that earn over a million dollars in profitg per year from personal sales. Do you think they were worried if i continued to chase after tiddlers ? They were out there catching sharks and whales !!


But i learned to target my customers just as they did.

Yamaha havent entered into the 76 Key arranger market for a business reason. Now i cant say hand on heart i know for definate what that reason is. I mean we atre all just speculating right ?

But it is only people like yourself that insist the 76 Key arranger market is something that yamaha should go into again just because a small and shrinking number of other companies have and may be making some profit but you have nothing tangible to base that on but your own imagination.

TTG made a really pivotal point earlier. he said

'Yes numbers do matter with any business.
I am sure Yamaha has those number.
But also as with any business there is a risk that businesses must take.
Sure it must be a control risk but they must take it if they want to be competitive.
The minute a company stops taking risk, they will loose their competitiveness because other companies will be innovative and although some consumers like the same thing over and over, a great deal like different things in a new product.

And if you stop taking risk, you stop being innovative.'

If he had developed his argument further he would have come to the other possibility that i and others have proposed that make a whole lot more business sense than this silly notion that yamaha are just being stubborn or their corporate structure means they cant enter the market!

Surely the most reasonable speculation why yamaha have not reentered the 76 key arranger market is that having done the reseach and having appreciated the potential numbers, they simply decided that the profit margins/gains were not worth the capital investmnet and the risk.

It may not always be the case and if you have the numbers to convince yamaha differently then please go right ahead and provide them with the numbers.

Thats my last post on the matter and i am sure you will all breath a sigh of relief :-)