The Qfd Analysis of Meade 80

In 80s civil optics industry, the competition of telescopes market was extremely

fierce, due to the functional similarity of the products and the relatively stable

size of the entire market. However, the action of one of the market intruders –

Meade, implied the potential change of this situation.

In 1993, a US based optics devices provider, Meade Instrumental Corporation

introduced its first auto aligned system, which overthrew the traditional manual

star positioning and searching procedure by integrating the whole process into

one computerized system. Accompanying by its newly designed mechanical

equator mount and control system, �sky align by pushing one button’ was no

longer a dream. At first, the whole system could only be considered by some of

the observation stations due to its super high price. But high cost did not last

long. In the late 90s, triggered by cost reduction of the main material and 3 yrs

re-design, Meade launched its brand new ETX series (Figure 1), featured by its

compact aluminum body, easy operating control system (Meade Easy-Align

sys tem), and totally affordable price, which significantly changed and

expanded the telescopes market. For example, other than astronomical

enthusiasts and amateurs, astronomical starters who do not know much about

how to operate traditional telescopes could also easily find and observe

designated stars by using the computerized ETX telescopes. In consequences,

the emergence and technological cutting edge of ETX series not only

established the dominance position of Meade in the next 5 yrs, but also

enhanced the volume of the entire telescopes market.

1.2 The current ETX series

Due to the miraculous success of ETX series brought to Meade, many

competitors of Meade and previous dominators of the telescopes market

desperately tried to achieve their own technical breakthrough. One of the

leaders of them was Celestron LLC. 4 yrs