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Why did Tektronix stop making the great scopes?
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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:

--- Quote from: Ecklar on December 24, 2014, 12:11:36 am ---Why did Tektronix stop making scopes like the venerable 2465 or 2465B?   What changed?   

--- End quote ---
Do you have any idea how much the 2465B was priced back there ? It was $5850 !!  :o

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

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

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:

--- Quote from: Ecklar on December 24, 2014, 12:11:36 am ---Why did Tektronix stop making scopes like the venerable 2465 or 2465B?   What changed?
--- End quote ---

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.


--- Quote ---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.   
--- End quote ---

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.


--- Quote ---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?
--- End quote ---

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.


--- Quote ---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.
--- End quote ---

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.
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