by
lmh » Thu Jun 16, 2022 10:07 am
But don't feel afraid to beat up Shimadzu a bit on this. At some point the manufacturers are going to have to realise that academic users are not the same as chemical-industry users. There is a phenomenally large difference between running an analytical group where you have 5 experts using the tools 8 hours a day 5 days a week, and having a lab where 50 post-docs and students use the software once a month.
In the past, many manufacturers have suffered from a big discrepancy between their licensing department and senior management, who live in a tower isolated from the real world (and think universities will buy 50 licenses), and the sales staff and engineers, who know the realities. The reps tended to deal with this by telling customers that the licensing didn't matter. Nowadays, there is usually some sort of software restriction meaning you can't just install the software willy-nillly, whatever the rep says. This makes for a big problem. Some manufacturers have got round it in constructive ways. Agilent, for example, have a package deal of a huge number of free installations when they sell to an academic environment.
Shimadzu, and the other culprits, need to get their heads round this. Or they will lose their academic customers completely. And this has knock-on consequences. People tend to buy things with which they are familiar. If the universities stop buying Shimadzu stuff because Agilent offers a better deal on the software, then when all of those students and post-docs grow up into hospital analytical lab administrators, researchers in big Pharma companies, and managers of Far Eastern mega-chemical-companies, they will simply order Agilent.
Failing to provide your customers with adequate ways to look at data now is an excellent way to flush your business down the toilet in 15 years' time.