I don't think that an unprofitable holder of 10% of the market (guess) is
really a "major competitor" to the holder of 75% of the market. UPS AT was
attractive for a number of reasons including ADS-B which I believe will
become a big deal in the future. It also didn't make too much sense for a
package delivery company to be developing and manufacturing avionics.

The GNS 480 is a half step above the 430/530. It has WAAS and airways but
also has fairly obtuse operating logic. The 430/530 have an easy upgrade
path to the GNS 480 capibilities. I think that the next big retrofit
product is an integrated product (like G1000) that has an ethernet-like
serial interface.. Once you have the sensors and displays all talking to
each other, it will be cheap and easy to add features by adding another
sensor to the network along with a software change. The installed cost of
avionics will be much lower if there are only four wires to connect.

Mike
MU-2

"Roy Smith" wrote in message
...
Mike Rapoport wrote:
UPS was not Garmin's "main competitor". UPS had insignificant revenue,
didn't make money and really had to sell. Everybody complains about the
"loss of competition" but very few were buying UPS's products. The
choice
was being aquired or disappearing.

The fact that UPS-AT was in bad shape (I don't know that they were,
but I'll take that as a given for the moment) doesn't take away from
the fact that they were Garmin's main competition.

Is there anybody else out there that was competing with Garmin for the
GA avionics market than UPS? Narco is dead. Northstar has pulled out
of aviation. King seems to have given up developing new products.
Collins is concentrating on the commercial market.

The sad fact is that the GA avionics market just isn't big enough to
support more than one major manufacturer, and Garmin seems to have
won.