Basically, what happened is that the old avionics players gradually dropped the ball. Some did it by making crap, and the good ones (Bendix/King/Honeywell) just lost interest in the GA market, becoming very arrogant companies only interested in the top slice of their business (jet avionics).
Garmin hung in there and grew by default, despite selling the same boring basic boxes for a decade or so (GNSx30).
When they saw a threat (Apollo) they bought the company and shut down the threatening products.
Eventually they ended up owning the world.
The G1000 is just a wrap-up of their old software and hardware technology, into one package which is made up of a load of modules. There is nothing new there. Maybe a bit of software... even SV is straight out of a decade old flight sim.
The G1000 costs an aircraft mfg less than the old avionics. I don't know how much less but probably a lot less. Take the list price of a King KI-256 vacuum horizon - $20k+ for some versions. This is a totally mad price. The dealer price would be -25%. The OEM price, 100+, would probably be about $10k. That is a huge pile of cash, and you can multiply that half a dozen times to get a half decent avionics fit. That is considerably more than the mfg is paying for the whole engine and accessories...
The incentive to save costs on avionics is accordingly massive, but no a/c mfg can just go and make their own. Eclipse kind of tried but even they did a JV with Avidyne I think, and despite their heavy Ponzi-style funding even they screwed up and ended up shipping the early jets with Garmin 496s (no kidding).
There aren't enough half decent electronics engineers around to do this from scratch. Most of the good ones are 50+ and have become managers and don't do real work anymore, but they get paid a lot more. Most avionics stuff now is designed by kids with little expertise. You only have to see the circuit diagrams to see the designer was clue-less.
So people like Honeywell (who made mostly very good stuff, in those days) had the mfgs by the g00lies and held them tight and squeezed them hard.
Then Garmin came along and cleaned up.... it was child's play at that point. My guess is that the OEM cost of a G1000 is less than 50% of the old stuff which (assuming there is a nice autopilot in there) will be similar to getting a whole 2nd engine for free... Garmin are making massive profits now because the cost to make a G1000 is only about $500. A GNS430W costs only about $200 to make.
I met a Honeywell exec at some Eurocontrol conference and said to him they should not have handed the market to Garmin on a plate. He just laughed, and agreed...
The glass products are good business for the whole supply pipeline because very few freelance installers can touch them. It's good for price support and all kinds of other restrictive practices which are always good for business.
Even the G1000 installation manuals took about 3 years to leak out onto the internet and that was only through a c0ckup by some Garmin dealer. Without those, Garmin have everybody by the balls.
Last edited by IO540; 25th February 2011 at 13:27.