I strongly disagree.
Unless you have access to source code, specs, schematics, and a participant in cross-dept meetings at DJI including R&D, Marketing, Support, and Manufacturing working out the myriad issues involved in making these decisions, I can't take what you say very seriously w.r.t. this.
I worked in R&D at HP starting as an engineer, then Project Manager, Senior Program Manager, Section Manager, then R&D Manager (not for all of HP, just Data Systems Division and later a division in printing and imagining).
I've been a part of many product releases from conception to shipment – a part of the leadership team we're talking about here that makes these decisions.
My comments in post #35 are based on that experience. No company I've ever worked for would ever behave so unethically, nor has. Support and compatability issues were always difficult, and never based in trying to force customers into buying something.
How much experience do you have with this? Are the places you have worked been staffed with such people that are simply looking to exploit customers? Could you describe how those cross-disciplinary meetings went? You guys sat around and talked about how you could boost sales by NOT giving customers what they want?
There were plenty of times HP added support (which required R&D) for product interoperability after release because our forecasts that too few customers would want it to justify the support impact was wrong. I note DJI adds support after the fact regularly too. You're narrowly thinking about this only from an engineering perspective. It's much more complicated than just if it "can technically be done".
I'm sincerely curious what your work experience is that makes you so cynical about DJI.
Not that it matters at all but I've had "senior engineer" in my job titles for about 20 years now, though I'd never lord that over someone in a discussion because that would be ridiculous. But I've been in app and embedded programming for a long long time. Not that I need to have worked in such an environment to identify this kind of very common marketing behavior, and claiming that anyone would is
silly.
As far as what makes me so cynical about DJI, I think first we have to agree that if they are in fact introducing incompatibilities just to cause people to buy more hardware, that they'd deserve our cynicism. Do you agree?
Assuming you do, lets look at the evidence we have. With closed source software as you know that's all we can do since we can't examine the code. And here's the strong evidence of shinanigans off the top of my head:
- the Plus works just fine with my
Mavic 3 Pro and
Mini 3 Pro, and probably every other OC3 drone that the Pro works with. Once that other firmware is shoehorned onto it.
- the Plus works out of the box with the
Mavic 3 Enterprise but not the Mavic 3P even though the Mavic 3E and 3P are the same drone, just a different camera. But it works perfectly with the 3P once we load the Pro firmware on it.
- as you say the various versions of Occusync are the same from a hardware perspective, and yet here we all are for years buying new hardware because DJI locks out the old hardware. That's the kind of thing that escalates someone from irritated to cynical and beyond.
I can't think of any evidence to the contrary. Your argument that it would be too expensive for DJI to make their controllers compatible with all their drones just isn't true. It's way cheaper for them to develop for a single hardware platform, which is pretty clearly what they're doing, though with minor differences like screens, number of buttons. But it's clearly the same bootloader, same version of Android, etc. And the fact that the hardware works perfectly across types of drones once DJI's roadblocks are hacked away is pretty strong proof of that.
No company I've ever worked for would ever behave so unethically, nor has.
Hopefully you're not arguing that companies don't do this kind of thing absolutely routinely, because that would be absurd. There are thousands of documented examples of companies doing this kind of thing, one of which I mentioned above with Canon withholding features from their lower end cameras even though those lower end cameras were perfectly capeable of shooting in raw mode for example. When the CHDK firmware was released everyone got to see that the low end cameras could do most of the high end features all along, but were just being artificially crippled. Exactly as the Plus is artificially crippled to not work with teh
Mavic 3 Pro,
Mini 3 Pro, etc. And exactly as my
Mavic 3 Pro is artificially crippled to not work with the SDK. And the list of DJI's shinanigans goes on and on.
Not that it matters much to the topic at hand, which is that the Plus works really well with the
Mavic 3 Pro,
Mini 3 Pro, etc. The only thing you and I are discussing is what conclusions to draw from that, which is relatively inconsequential. I'm just glad to be able to use such a great controller with my drones.
