"Dude" wrote in message
...
Much as I hate to say it, Garmin looks pretty far ahead of the
alternatives

You are listing their successes and saying they are not making any
mistakes.
That doesn't hold any water. The mistakes they make today could easily be
their downfall in the future, and the big one is pride.

Pride didn't stop Microsoft from gaining their position and they never met a
release date they didn't blow. The only things that will hurt Garmin are (a)
deterioration of their market or (b) competition.

Garmin is well-positioned for the swings of the GA market because the G1000
spans such a broad swathe of the aviation market. Avidyne, OTOH, is nearly
100% tied to new shipments of piston singles, which is the most cyclical
segment of the market.

As to competition, who? The barriers to entry are substantial- designing and
certifying a G1000 competitor would probably cost well into the tens of
millions. Even Avidyne hasn't done this, if you consider that the Entegra
system gets its navigation and communication capabilities from *Garmin*
radios. We're probably talking on the order of fifty million or more. That's
a major chunk of change.

Now, how big is the GA avionics market, really? Let's say that Cessna,
Piper, Cirrus, and Diamond ship about 4,000 new planes per year, and adding
everybody else gets us to 5,000. Assuming every single one of these gets a
full glass flight deck at the value of $30k per plane, you're looking at
$150 million per year. That's not profit, either, just revenue. I suspect
there is more money in those little packets of salt and ketchup you get at
McDonald's, with a lot fewer difficulties.

Adding all this together, it looks pretty unlikely that anyone new is going
to enter this market. The best hope that's out there is for King and Avidyne
to get together and come up with a real G1000 alternative, but I wouldn't
bet on it. In fact, my portfolio is betting that Garmin will continue
cleaning up, as they have been doing for some time now.

-cwk.