[TenTec] The future of The Orion I

[Lee Crocker]

The used price of a privately sold Orion will be
pegged to the price Ten Tec asks for a used Orion.  

The differential between the two will simply be the
premium one is willing to pay for one that is
basically guaranteed to be good from TT vs a privately
sold Orion of unknown virtue.  Namely a couple hundred
bux.  So if TT sells a used Orion for 3K you can
expect to get about 2800 for your used Orion as a
private sale.  I do not see the O2 as materially
effecting the price of a used Orion one way or the
other.  This is the way it has worked for the various
flavors of Omni, the Paragons, The Pegasus and a host
of other discontinued TT radios.  

It will behoove TT as much as possible to continue to
support the Orion in firmware, as this will keep the
used price at a premium.  It will be a simple business
decision when the Orion's firmware is no longer
maintained.  The bean counters can and will determine
when it is no longer profitable to maintain the
Orion's code, and that point is when it costs more to
maintain the code compared to the relative return it
generates.  As long as it is a fairly trivial matter
to maintain the Orion code as a subset of the O2 code,
it keeps the value of a used Orion at a premium.    

Look at what TT charges for a loaded Omni VI and what
similarly outfitted privately sold Omni's go for, and
you will get some idea of the price differential.  
Clearly it won't be $1700 down from a new O2, at least
in the near term.  What you are basically paying for
in the O2 is a marked up to retail, friggin color
screen and the correction in the cascade filter scheme
that everyone was whining about.   See what happens
when you whine to hard...  You get what you whined
for, at a new and improved price point.  

One more thing:  The sky is falling!!! The sky is
falling!!! It hit me on the head....  Quick call my
psycho-therapist... I think I'm having a panic
attack... Ten ten brought out a new radio....and now
I'm going to have to cough up another kilobuck to
maintain my braggin rights.... Sheesh what a gyp...
You'd think they would bring out a $15 dollar upgrade
to save my braggin rights instead of trying to
maintain profitability and give pay checks to their
employees...    

Sometimes this list cracks me up, but then I work in
medicine where everybody thinks they deserve a
trillion dollars worth of care for a $15 dollar
co-pay, and then they try to shaft you for the co-pay,
so you know I'm jaded.

73

W9OY


		
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