The programmable calculator the HP-30b should have been

[Joseph_21sv]

(09-08-2014 07:20 PM)Tim Wessman Wrote:  

(09-08-2014 07:09 PM)Joseph_21sv Wrote:  That just begs the question: If HP made that mistake in the first edition 20b manual, why is the Business Professional calculator numbered 30b rather than 20bII? In fact, why didn’t HP just make the 20b originally programmable like the whole world thought they must have intended to do from seeing that mistake?

It wasn't a mistake. Two products - two price points. What is so difficult to understand about that? That is a universal marketing/business strategy.

The manuals were meant to be the same for both products, with sections saying "in the 30b, ...." to include additional information for the custom features.

See: 48GII/49g+
BAII+/BAII+ Professional
iPhone 5s/iPhone 5c

The way @Thomas Radtke wrote the comment that I quoted, it gives me the impression that he means the edition of the manual which shipped with the first few batches of 20b units in 2008. But it sort of still is a more subtle mistake: For several months HP appeared to have released a product that didn’t actually exist yet and confused consumers sent back hundreds of perfectly functional calculators mistakenly thinking they were defective. This mixup effectively gave away that HP would be using the two products-two price points strategy with their “Super 10BII” calculator before they were even started thinking of what that second price point might be—admittedly HP didn’t really need to use that strategy as they discontinued the 20b the year after they released the 30b. What I actually don’t understand about all that is why HP would accidentally give away what they were doing and then quietly discontinue one product upon realizing that they had made the other to supersede it by so much—why not just make the more sophisticated one in the first place like they actually made people mistakenly think they had done? Doing that would have saved the unnecessary returns of what would have been hundreds of perfectly functional calculators but for the documented feature that the calculators actually didn’t have—and also two years of consumers waiting for the other shoe to drop. Ultimately, I guess I don’t understand why two products-two price points is so universal that it is even used for twin products where the one twin product supersedes the other by so much that the other is discontinued after the release of that product.