New Butterfly rubber "Dignics 05" 2019

says Shoo...nothing to see here. - zeio
says Shoo...nothing to see here. - zeio
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Hardly innovating here. D05 is mostly tinkering of the sponge that in itself an extension on T05. Nothing revolutionary like T05 back in 2008.
 
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New Butterfly rubber "Dignics 05" 2019

Zeio, what innovation did T05 bring to the table, in terms of technology and process?

(Minor pet peeve: in hindsight people seem to like to enforce the narrative of spectacular breakthrough. In the real world, innovation is a grinding process existing of small steps. A far less sexy story, far less heroic, yet more palatable by far — because it brings the realm of innovation within our grasp, dispensing with the need for magical or superhuman ability.)
 
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(trump trashtalking snipped, no need to embrace/echo the alt-right framing)

I'm confused. I wasn't criticizing or playing smart at your expense, Zeio, I was genuinely curious. I didn't play when Tenergy was introduced, and when taking up the game a lot of things had happened that I hadn't experienced the development of.
 

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It is quite interesting to follow this kind of post because it seems you forgot the main information. Table Tennis is in a constant evolution since the beginning and you are only talking about the rubber when the most important is the complete game. I don't want to remind the history but since we stopped to glue we had a lot of improvement in blades, rubbers but the most important thing was the ball, changing from 38 to 40mm first, then from celluloid to plastic. the response of a rubber in front of those balls is highly different and the Tenergy family has been developped to play with a 40mm celluloid ball. Dignics is the first rubber developped by Butterfly to be used with a 40mm plastic ball which is significantly different as the goal when the T05 has been created. I'm playing with T64fx 2.1 and I took a Dignics05 2.1 to test and see if it can improve my game. Anyway if we have so much blades and rubbers maybe it's because we are just human and our feeling is too different as the way we are playing.

I'm afraid you have wrongly interpreted my comment and assumed something which isn't there. I talk purely about business and marketing. Nothing about innovation, evolution of the game, results of athletes, nothing about table tennis in particular. I just claimed that companies like Butterfly are making big money on rubbers (definitely more then blades and probably still more then apparel and other things like tables etc.), that Butterfly is number one on the market by far (world wide as well as all key markets - maybe except China?), that Tenergy is cash cow kind of product (development costs were paid long time ago, no competing product with similar margin and turn around anywhere close to it, just keep rolling on mastering the manufacturing process and being able to plan the volumes and save money on logistics and other things while maintaining the price hence increasing margins even further) and that Dignics is just example how such companies want to complement their cash cow with product on higher end and then slowly replace it by not losing any market share but in contrary by rising the revenues and margins. That makes them another cash cow which gives them another 5+ years of good sleep and great business results. Butterfly did it with Sriver before and many other companies are doing it for years in all business segments (the most popular example are Apple's phones but that has much faster cycle of one/two years and so it's not surprising that after some time the company will start to struggle to repeat the success of higher-end product - and price range - replacement of previous cash cow and will start to decline - slowly or faster).

So as conclusion I claimed that it's very likely that price of Dignics will really be ~30% higher then Tenergy and that if the product is really better in some aspects (which it should be considering Butterfly working on it for 10 years) it will most probably be as successful as Sriver/Bryce/Tenergy transitions. The price of the rubber and Butterfly's strategy, that was all what was discussed here at that time (and guess what: my price predictions were right;)
 
says Shoo...nothing to see here. - zeio
says Shoo...nothing to see here. - zeio
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I'm confused. I wasn't criticizing or playing smart at your expense, Zeio, I was genuinely curious. I didn't play when Tenergy was introduced, and when taking up the game a lot of things had happened that I hadn't experienced the development of.

but he is right. they keep bring up Butterfly anything and make it out to be a bad thing. but say you replace the word Butterfly with ESN and it's all good. so ESN loyalist are good but Butterfly ones are bad
 
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they keep bring up Butterfly anything

Nope, still confused. There’s an anti bty conspiracy? Who’s this they? And with pricing levels, selective narrowing of the resale channel, aggressive sponsoring schemes etc. so visible as a marketing scheme, how could you be surprised about it being mentioned?

“They” might also have a few words to say when Xiom Omegaër VIII Tour hits the shelves at $120 a sheet, or do you think Xiom would not be subject to mutters and gripes about that?

I honestly don’t get what you’re saying here. That must be it.
 
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When Tenergy came out it was the closest thing to an old school rubber with speed glue. It took other manufacturers almost a decade to come up with anything even close to as good as Tenergy. I would say they figured something out. I would say that took some technology and design to manipulate sponge and rubber to respond the way Tenergy did. Even manipulating the pip structure to get 05, 64 and later 80 without changing anything but the pips (size, shape and pip arrangement) to get such different responses from the same material was kind of ground breaking.

So, I would say the engineering behind Tenergy was big. And there was some technology behind developing the new sponge and topsheet rubbers and getting them to behave the way they do.

And, as far as I can tell, a lot of what ESN does to try and duplicate some of the effects of Tenergy is add boost or tuner in the factory. That wears off. Tenergy does not dive bomb in performance after a few weeks.
 
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says Shoo...nothing to see here. - zeio
says Shoo...nothing to see here. - zeio
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Zeio, what innovation did T05 bring to the table, in terms of technology and process?

(Minor pet peeve: in hindsight people seem to like to enforce the narrative of spectacular breakthrough. In the real world, innovation is a grinding process existing of small steps. A far less sexy story, far less heroic, yet more palatable by far — because it brings the realm of innovation within our grasp, dispensing with the need for magical or superhuman ability.)

All righty. I didn't want to answer that because it's a pain to type it out so I'll keep it short.

Bryce was a breakthrough in topsheet, whereas Tenergy was a breakthrough in sponge.

Due to the glue ban, the impact of Tenergy was far more widespread than that of Bryce. After years of dependence, people suffered speed-glue withdrawal. I remember a club mate claiming he forgot how to play without speed glue. That's how bad people craved for that "high" feel. Spring Sponge filled that void with its unique "sucking the ball" feel.


What's so special about Tenergy? The topsheet of Tenergy was essentially an incremental upgrade on Bryce, but the Spring Sponge was a game changer because it literally scared the shit out of many table tennis fans with big-ass holes like those seen in Swiss cheese.

swiss-cheese.jpg


EJs won't even flinch nowadays, but it was unheard of back then. Holes this big were seen in kitchen sponge only, which has an open-cell structure for maximum absorption, as opposed to the closed-cell structure for maximum resilience in table tennis rubber.

replace-our-kitchen-sponges.jpg


Manufacturing closed-cell rubber with big holes proved to be a challenge because of shrinkage. They shrink much more than traditional sponge as the trapped air within all these "bubbles" escape. Butterfly went through a lot of trouble getting it to stabilize.
 
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