It’d make sense for sister companies to share technologies more easily compared to a licensee/affiliated company to obtain technology from the mother company. But still, no matter how many similarities they may share between them, conventional wisdom says that they must still maintain some kind of key differentiation, or else why would William Demant want to keep 2 (or 3) companies that sell essentially the same product under different brandings anyway? It’d just be simpler and probably cheaper to merge them together and be done with it. But since William Demant acquired Oticon and Sonic and Bernafon over the years, they probably already have developed different technical innovations and have had separate product histories way back, so the product differentiation is easy to do, if not even crucial to keep and maintain to reach a wider portion of the market.
But with Philips, while they had a hearing aid arm way back, they did sell it out to Beltone 24 years ago already. So they’re in a different position as a William Demant licensee because they don’t have a heritage of hearing aid technology development under them anymore. William Demant licensed to them because Philips has an extensive reach into the health care market, so WD hopes to be able to leverage this reach from Philips to expand further into those sales channels in the Philips HealthCare arm. From this perspective, the technology differentiation becomes less important (like what they have with the 3 sisters), but what’s important is to take whatever sells best between the 3 sisters, or whatever else they may have cooking in the WD incubators, to give to Philips to expand into the Philips sales arm. From this angle, it would make sense if Philips may eventually be given the same core from one of the 3 sisters.
What I’m speculating here, at the risk of being accused of talking out of thin air by certain folks here who are hostile to me, is that when Oticon developed the AI DNN for their More, they came up with several DNN versions. The one that fits best with the open paradigm, they implemented it in the More. One of the other versions (with a focus on speech in noise), they gave to Philips to package and sell. It’s possible that with the 9040, WD might have decided to give Philips the Oticon More DNN core that has the added Wind handling which became the Real DNN. It’s also possible that they decided to train the Wind handling directly to the Philips AI core as well, like they did with the Real DNN core. So it’s not a foregone conclusion that if Philips now has the Wind feature, then they must have the Oticon Real DNN core.
All we can do is speculate for new releases, and share our personal anecdotal experiences on old and current releases. That’s what this forum is all about. Anyone who doesn’t like to participate in these kinds of speculation of new releases can simply choose to ignore and not read these posts. There’s really no need to get hostile and turn an interesting speculative discussion into a bad thing.
