I wonder if FDNY wanted to move towards rechargeable batteries in the their SCBA and Scott didn’t want to make that available or figure out how to offer it. 6 AA batteries across how many 1000’s of SCBA’s the FDNY has to have….pain in the ass to maintain and $$$
PHASE C NEXT GENERATION MASK TESTING IN THE FDNY.
- Thread starter 68jk09
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Sure...that's one way to tilt the playing field in someone's favor; or against another. You think Scott's electrical and systems engineers are incapable of producing a DC electrical circuit with a different power source?
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I don't think anyone doubts the capabilities of Scotts (3M) design team or engineering teams. It always comes down to what is this going to cost us to develop and bring a working prototype to market in a short time. None of us knows, yet, why Scott was eliminated from the finals. We will know eventually. Yes I have seen bids "channeled" to a favorite vendor. It's all in the creative writing of the specs. But we have two finalists, not one, so the specs apparently weren't written that tight. I have been a critic of the Draeger design - mainly its orientation of air supply, gauges and controls....but Draeger just recently put a lot of effort and money into modernizing its Air Boss pack to meet the needs of the American Fire Service....basically they took away a lot of my arguments against it. The Chart I provided above in this thread shows Scott still at 40% market share but MSA close on their heels at 35%, Draeger at 15%. The List I provided above demonstrates that some significantly sized departments that see significant fire duty have migrated away from Scott. Who knows why? I have always been happy and preferred the Scott, especially the mask itself. But, again, the speed of which technology, innovation, and product evolution occur today versus 20-40 years ago is incredible. To survive, a company must constantly be competitive and keep up with the rest of the pack. When you have private equity managers squeezing every penny and slowing down expenditures on R&D they loose market share. People tell me they don't want to go out of business. You have to understand venture capitalists and private equity. They take on a hot selling product perhaps one that has the greatest market share. They have already run the numbers and have already determined when and at what price they will unload that company or that product from the company. In the meantime they spend years maximizing profits as the product falls behind competitors and loses market share. At a predetermined point the product or company is sold, often to one of the competitors who then puts the final death blow on the product/company in order to increase its market share (filling a newly created void) overnight due to lack of completion. So while firefighters say I can't believe Scott is letting FDNY slip out of their hands, the corporate leadership at Scott(3M) just shrugs it off since it is part off the overall strategy on why they bought the Scott brand in the first place.