Tharon, well said.
I guess my point was that in 20 years, they were able to make the same computing power fit into a calculator, that if I can talk to my phone, and it can answer me, then why can't the giants of the PLC industry move forward as well. It was a glancing blow to OP's original statement of being stuck in the 90's.
These things that were complicated were made very simple, ONLY because there was alot of money to be made selling to the masses.
PLC's could be made to be simpler, there is just not as much money to be made in revolutionizing a standing, well made, long lasting product. Difficult and expensive to replace too.
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As a result, everyone else ( Siemens, Schneider, Idec, and hundreds more) have been chasing them down. All of them the same......but different. Consequently everyone is trying to cut a niche in the market, very few are trying to revolutionize it.
It was a high light as to why thing aren't changing.
An interesting insight. Thank you for the feed back.
John,
What does the move forward look like? How do we tell who is revolutionizing, and who is cutting a niche? Someone replied to another of my posts wth a Steve Jobs quote, and I think it's really relevant here: "A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them." The other side of that coin though, is that sometimes people don't want what is better for them, they want what they already have.
What revolution do we want? "Easier to use" is relative. "Innovative" doesn't mean much to me if it doesn't solve a problem I have.
Take a company like Bedrock. They redesign a lot of things from the ground up: magnetic backplane, claims of security up the wazoo. I know plenty of engineers that are curious about it, but we aren't INTERESTED. The product doesn't fit the paradigm we are used to, and so we semi politely chuckle and ignore it.
Many vendors have introduced PC based systems. Our industry as a whole ignores them, because PC security is a pain (which is true) and that doesn't really help solve any of our core problems. We can use more modern programming languages, but people complain that they are too complicated.
We're an industry where 50% of the people spending money long for the simple good ol' days of relay logic with physical relays. That's one of the biggest reasons we don't see much change.
We all complain about slow, bloated new software in one breath, and then complain that they didn't add enough features in teh next breath.
Sometimes it just takes a long time to do things the right way. Standards organization bureaucracy isn't the best example of progress, but the High Performance HMI standard has been moving forward for years. Same thing with Time Sensitive Networking on the the communications end.
I would say that the giants of the industry HAVE moved forward. We have Ethernet replacing serial connections. PLCs are much faster and have way more memory than ever before. You're right, that for the most part these are evolutionary changes, not revolutionary. But I think we're also just not adopting a lot of the new features and platforms. THat doesn't mean we're wrong for liking the products we have now. It doesn't mean that our complaints about the newest features are invalid. It just means it isn't as simple as "just go innovate!"
I'm not saying I know what the answer is. For my part, I'm a big fan of a lot of features that have traditionally been used more in the DCS space. We're seeing a lot of those concepts moving into separated PLC/HMI systems. I'd love it if someone found a way to make programming even simpler, but the trick is making it simple without removing capability. Dunno if it can be done.
