Legacy Products – Vintage or Obsolete?
Old, Obsolete, Legacy or Vintage?
We support Electronic Immortality!
It was announced last summer that Funai Electric1, reportedly the last manufacturer of VCRs, was ceasing production of the video tape machines. Intel2 has been changing its emphasis away from PCs with a focus shift to IoT and cloud-based computing. It is a seemingly inevitable cycle where new becomes old and, eventually, obsolete. As a consumer, should I stock up on old hardware so I can view my library of tapes or pay to have them converted to digital media (and try to avoid the next one slated for obsolescence)?
But what about businesses that need to continue to operate with “obsolete” technology when costs or risks associated with upgrades are too great to abandon the old, but functional, technology? Finance, defense, and air traffic control are just a few well known markets where processes, systems, hardware, and software have been kept in use long after they have been declared obsolete. Some products have even made the transition to vintage, enabling them to command high prices – quite a change from old and cheap, or obsolete and worthless! As the song goes, everything old is new again.
A quick search brings up pages of companies offering everything from new-old-stock to modern packaging of legacy die-bank inventory; refurbs and restorations to replications. If you like what you’ve got, or just need to extend the life of your current platform, there’s hope.
Being in the business of providing custom products to handle and protect components, we see a steady flow of business from companies working with legacy products. We are able to help bridge old and new by providing interface products that let you handle all types of components, old and new, in your current manufacturing process. If you are digging those parts out of cold storage or a sacred vault, you don’t need a time machine to build with them. Sometimes old really is new!
1 http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/22/technology/vcr-funai-last/
2 https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/brian-krzanich-our-strategy-and-the-future-of-intel/