Why did Tektronix stop making the great scopes?

[Ecklar]

Why did Tektronix stop making scopes like the venerable 2465 or 2465B?   What changed?   With the recent EEVBLOG tear down exposing the solid build and ability it seems like Tek could have updated with a little modern tech and kept improving these things.  Some may say that the rise of the digital caused the demise but I'm hearing all over the place just how great the analog scopes are and that the digital can't replace the feel and response.   So if they are so great then why doesn't Tek or someone else use modern tech, and cheap Chinese labor and grind out these scopes at one quarter the price?

Eck

Or were they really not that great and we are just like babying old English sportscars?  You you?  They're fun and we love them but the modern stuff is just more dependable and funtionable. 

[Rerouter]

I'm going only from memory so it may not be all correct,

I heard that it was an ownership change, from an engineer to a standard CEO type, so money was diverted from R&D into marketing and sales, for an already stong brand,
As well that they started to rebrand things,

[miguelvp]

Can't find the 2465B list price but the 2467B with a different CRT cost in 1990 was $13,045

Source:
http://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/2467

So think of how cheap they are now taking into account inflation (around $24,100 in 2014 money)

[larry42]

Because there is no way to make these for the 300 USD price point. Not enough market for high quality CRTs to make a 100$ Bill of materials. Shipping costs. Oh, and sever lack of functionality.

I love (and use) old test equipment. But there is no market for 300MHz analog scopes.

[Richard Crowley]

The Tektronix campus is practically a ghost town anymore.  More and more of the buildings appear to be leased (or sold?) to other companies.
I doubt that the master craftspeople who made the CRTs are even around anymore.
Does ANY modern equipment still use CRT technology?

[tautech]

Ecklar seems to be trolling the forum for blatently obvious replies. Check his posts.
His threads should be in general chat, they are of little use in test equipment.

I won't even offer a reply to this subject.

[Maxlor]

Those mentioned Tek scopes are the swan song of CROs, the best they could do, and I'm still a bit angry at myself for missing that local auction for a 2465B a while ago.

But... I'd be willing to pay the equivalent of a modern low-end scope's price for one of those old CROs. I certainly wouldn't pay what it would actually cost to make, even with modern parts.

[N2IXK]

Tektronix made their own CRTs, and closed the CRT operations when the bottom fell out of analog scopes in the 1990s.

http://www.vintagetek.org/crt-a-look-back/

They used to make all their own custom ASICs right on their Beaverton campus, but sold off the semiconductor operations to Maxim, IIRC.

Once Danaher took over, they began dismantling the company, outsourcing as much as they could, and left the company a shell of its former self.

[Richard Crowley]

They used to make all their own custom ASICs right on their Beaverton campus, but sold off the semiconductor operations to Maxim, IIRC.

Yes, the former Tek fab was sold to Maxim who use it for production to this day.



I remember visiting there back when Tek was operating it.  They used tiny cute little 2 or 3 inch wafers.
By comparison, just 3-4 miles east of there, I work at a campus that has probably the planet's largest collection of 300mm (12 inch) wafer fabs.
And we are doing research on the next step:  450MM/18 inch wafers.

[coppice]

Tektronix never really recovered from the fall of the Berlin wall.

[LabSpokane]

Tek suffered from a massive amount of brain drain as well as the inefficiencies of total vertical integration. It seems like the whole Portland industrial economy was centered around Tek. One can't hardly swing a dead cat around Portland or Vancouver and hit a former Tek facility or a spinoff started by former employees. Between the management changes and the burden of building every, single component in-house, the burden switched from innovation to a struggle just to manage it all. I started my career in two of the spin offs, and the legacy management issues from Tek were really obvious.

One company had a truly bizarre leftover rule - I shit you not - a let-it-burn policy. In other words, if a fire started, one was not allowed to use a fire extinguisher, no matter how minor it was. You were to turn around, walk away, and call the fire department while the building burned to the ground.

The vertical integration was just a huge albatross. Owning dedicated facilities for everything from PWBs to CRTs to plastics shops that not only molded every knob and case part, they even built all the tooling in-house.  The overhead costs were ridiculous - and only a ridiculous price tag could support it.

[BravoV]

Why did Tektronix stop making scopes like the venerable 2465 or 2465B?   What changed?   

Do you have any idea how much the 2465B was priced back there ? It was $5850 !! 

The 2465B's equivalent price + inflation at 2014 is now about $13,000. 

Suggesting you to skip calculating the equivalent 2467B's price in these days, afraid you will have the heart attack. 

[Noise Floor]

Lots of good points covered already, but the short answer is mature industry + "Danaher".

Danaher a conglomerate that buys up mature industries typically and operationalizes them for efficiency plays.  In the case of T&M there is a lot of commoditization, but IMO there is still a need for investment in high end capabilities and software.  I think Danaher is more interested in milking tek then investing in innovation based on recent product offerings, but it may just be a lull caused during the take over.

[LabSpokane]

One last point, don't underestimate the allure of the PC market of the mid 80s through the 90s. Tek had a market-leading color printer in the Phaser series, and like HP, they wanted out of the fuddy duddy T&M business and into the "gold-mine" PC market.  That's where the focus was for long enough for HP/Agilent to leave Tek in the dust in T&M.

[Wuerstchenhund]

Why did Tektronix stop making scopes like the venerable 2465 or 2465B?   What changed?

For example that it's no longer 1986? No-one really wants to buy some large boat anchor with a fish glass and primitive functionality in 2014. Especially when the price equivalent in today's money can get you some really nice digital scopes.

With the recent EEVBLOG tear down exposing the solid build and ability it seems like Tek could have updated with a little modern tech and kept improving these things.  Some may say that the rise of the digital caused the demise but I'm hearing all over the place just how great the analog scopes are and that the digital can't replace the feel and response.   

Sounds like you spent too much listening to people stuck in yesteryear who have never really used a modern advanced scope.

The thing is that scopes no longer are devices for looking at waveforms. These days they have become complex signal analyzers. Often enough just staring at the screen doesn't really reveal anything, and only with advanced maths and measurement capabilities which are only available with a decent modern DSO culprits in complex signals can be found. And then there's stuff like bus decoding which is impossible with an analog scope.

Don't get me wrong, back in the days these scopes were great, and even today they still could be used for some simple tasks. And an analog scope can be a nice addition for any hobbyist shop if it's free or for a few bucks only. But apart from pure nostalgia the time of analog scopes has passed long ago.

So if they are so great then why doesn't Tek or someone else use modern tech, and cheap Chinese labor and grind out these scopes at one quarter the price?

The Chinese did exactly that, over a decade ago, along with several Eastern European manufacturers. The reason they stopped is that analog scopes were already a dead end 20 years ago. And because of the high integration which is possible with modern technology, simpler DSOs can be made at very low costs, and even those already vastly exceed the capabilities of most analog scopes.

Or were they really not that great and we are just like babying old English sportscars?  You you?  They're fun and we love them but the modern stuff is just more dependable and funtionable.

That's probably much closer to the truth. The build quality of these scopes may have been pretty solid overall but they still have mechanical switches that show wear and cause problems after all these years. And not all Tek scopes were that great, i.e. we had lots of issues with their 7000 Series and its flakey plugins back in the old days. These days, even a modern low end scope is very likely to exceed the time without repair of most analog scopes by a big margin.

The thing with Tek is that back in the old days they produced some really good and advanced scopes, but after the shift to DSOs Tek started to loose their edge against HP/Agilent and LeCroy. And when Danaher finally took over Tek in 2007 and introduced them to their Danaher Business System (DBS) (which is basically a system of micromanagement and extreme cost cutting) they essentially strangled the last bit of technological creativity left in Tektronix.

Today the only people buying new Tek scopes are either old-timers stuck in the old days or corporate buyers who have no real clue what they're buying. In terms of scope technology they are pretty much behind anyone else.

[SL4P]

Take a look at AMPEX in the same generation of companies - and a very similar outcome.

Interestingly - both companies had a very large stake in broadcast video equipment (SONY too), and they have all felt the earth move drastically since the mid-90s with the shift to digital technology.

Plenty of people pushed them t respond earlier in the 90s, but by then they were all dropping into the US groove of money-money-money / shareholder returns etc.  Nothing to do with innovation.  Sadly, as much as I loved all three - they got what they deserved.

[Wuerstchenhund]

One last point, don't underestimate the allure of the PC market of the mid 80s through the 90s. Tek had a market-leading color printer in the Phaser series, and like HP, they wanted out of the fuddy duddy T&M business and into the "gold-mine" PC market.  That's where the focus was for long enough for HP/Agilent to leave Tek in the dust in T&M.

Not quite. Tektronix had some advanced printers (i.e. solid ink printers, which is what the original Phaser Series was)
but the color printer market belonged to ink jets and later color lasers which both were cheaper than solid ink. When it turned out that solid ink wasn't the commercial success Tek had hoped they started making laser printers under the Phaser moniker as well. The commercial failure of solid ink was a problem for Tek as they did invest quite a lot in this technology.

However, Tek never had illusions that the printer business would become more profitable than their T&M division, and certainly didn't want to get out of the (at that time) more profitable T&M business. The fact that they struggled with their printer business was the reason they eventually sold the whole division to Xerox in 2000.

[EEVblog]

Why did Tektronix stop making scopes like the venerable 2465 or 2465B?   What changed?

Danaher.

[rx8pilot]

Why did Tektronix stop making scopes like the venerable 2465 or 2465B?   What changed?

Danaher.

Subtle. 
This has happened to so many innovative leaders. Somehow, the MBA's are only taught to milk the cow without any understanding that they also need to feed it.

[poorchava]

If they switched from making good analog scopes to good digital scopes, then fine, but their digital scopes leave much to be desired. I use an MSO2024 at work as my everyday all-round scope and almost everything leaves a feeling that "it could work better". Software is slow, settings are not stellar (eg vertical offset adjustment range depends on volts/div), logic analyzer is slow and has peculiar setup. It just seems like this is some sub-standard product, not a name brand. I've worked with Agilents (mainly MSO3xxx models) and they just work better.

[Wuerstchenhund]

This has happened to so many innovative leaders. Somehow, the MBA's are only taught to milk the cow without any understanding that they also need to feed it.

Indeed. LeCroy had more luck, though. They were taken over by Teledyne in 2012 but unlike Danaher Teledyne seems to leave LeCroy a lot of leeway to do their own thing, and the takeover hasn't hampered their capability to innovate.

[miguelvp]

I wouldn't mind having an MDO3000 series but to rich for my pocket

[LabSpokane]

One last point, don't underestimate the allure of the PC market of the mid 80s through the 90s. Tek had a market-leading color printer in the Phaser series, and like HP, they wanted out of the fuddy duddy T&M business and into the "gold-mine" PC market.  That's where the focus was for long enough for HP/Agilent to leave Tek in the dust in T&M.

Not quite. Tektronix had some advanced printers (i.e. solid ink printers, which is what the original Phaser Series was)
but the color printer market belonged to ink jets and later color lasers which both were cheaper than solid ink. When it turned out that solid ink wasn't the commercial success Tek had hoped Tek started making laser printers as well. The commercial failure of solid ink was a problem for Tek as they did invest quite a lot in this technology.

However, Tek never had illusions that the printer business would become more profitable than their T&M division, and certainly didn't want to get out of the (at that time) more profitable T&M business. The fact that they struggled with their printer business was the reason they eventually sold the whole division to Xerox in 2000.

Mmmm...ok...but we worked directly with every major printer company besides Canon and as far as as print quality and speed at that time, Tek ruled. Of course inkets were much higher volume and killed everyone on price with the advent of the sub-$100 printer.

We worked direct with Tek and what I saw in development was printers printers printers. T&M felt like a sideshow in that era. Just my perspective from the cheap seats.

[Fsck]

This has happened to so many innovative leaders. Somehow, the MBA's are only taught to milk the cow without any understanding that they also need to feed it.

Indeed. LeCroy had more luck, though. They were taken over by Teledyne in 2012 but unlike Danaher Teledyne seems to leave LeCroy a lot of leeway to do their own thing, and the takeover hasn't hampered their capability to innovate.

lecroy's low end is kind of a joke though.

[LabSpokane]

Why did Tektronix stop making scopes like the venerable 2465 or 2465B?   What changed?

Danaher.

Working for Danaher has to absolutely suck and I'm sure they're nailing the last of the coffin shut, but Tek was massively contracting at least a decade and a half prior to that event (in 2007).  Tek hosed itself over before anyone else had a chance to assist.   

By the late 80s / early 90s cash flow was essentially non-existent at the satellite shops.  Tek literally had toolmakers cutting fasteners out of hexagonal bar stock because there was no money to buy them.  I wish I would have kept some of those.  It was hard to convince the old timer toolmakers that it was OK to buy nuts and bolts again, so they kept making fasteners by hand.

I just checked the news and it sounds like Tek is down to well under 1000 employees now.