Grey Market Pianos/Dealers

[J Patrick Draine]

On Sunday, March 2, 2003, at 08:43  AM, Phil Bondi wrote:

> The question I have, and it may not be a very bright one..but:
>
> Why does Yamaha continue to make products specifically designed for 
> certain
> climates? While we can all appreciate the R&D and the production that 
> goes
> on for such an undertaking, why do they continue to manufacture 
> 'climate
> specific' when the company is fully aware that it can not control 
> where that
> piano may end up?

My comment is not Yamaha specific, but I suggest that we look at 
analogous situations in other industries. Perhaps 15 (maybe its closer 
to 18) years ago in the computer industry PCs made with better CPU 
chips were advertised as running at certain speeds (absurdly low in 
today's terms, let's just say x MHz) and had a zippy math coprocessor 
to make number crunching easier. One could also get the (PCs equipped 
with or the actual) chip without the math coprocessor at a lower price. 
I thought these the CPU chips with math coprocessors were more 
expensive because the coprocessors were a special add-on.
According to a friend who was working on the assembly and testing lines 
(back when high end workstations were actually made in Massachusetts!) 
there was one variety of CPU chip that came into the factory. He and 
his coworkers would run tests on the chips. Those that exceeded certain 
performance specs went into the higher end models and were advertised 
as having the special math coprocessor. For those that flunked the high 
end math processing tests had the pin that went to the coprocessor 
nipped off, and the chips went in the lower priced models. Perhaps 
purists would have preferred that those chips had been crushed up and 
put in the dumpster, rather than being used in PCs capable of word 
processing and non-intensive numbers crunching (OK for budgets but not 
major statistical analyses). The PC makers didn't think that was a 
viable way for them to stay in business.
Similarly, it makes sense to me that some manufacturer of zillions of 
pianos  might look at the millions of board feet of wood in their 
inventory and decide that certain subsets of that inventory which had 
already been seasoned to particular specs which will have a low failure 
rate in semitropical climates would be suited to that marketplace. And 
that wood that is further inspected and seasoned may be appropriate for 
a "temperate climate/intense indoor household heating system" 
environment.
It's a business decision. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Patrick Draine