It's probably a market failure if you can make loads of money (profit rather than revenue) doing mundane things. If your moat isn't something like novelty or patents or concentrated unique expertise then you should be just scraping by in an ideal scenario. You might say they have trust or brand recognition or whatever, but that shouldn't prevent new entrants in a market where the products aren't developing quickly and you can undercut them by taking a smaller margin.
Nobody has ever made a printer exceptionally well.
But seriously, you'd have to say how it is that your maker of mundane widgets can do a much better job than any competitor. Maybe the company is run by a printer savant, ok. But if it's just because you have good practices they should be copyable, if it's the best employees it should be possible and worthwhile to coax them away, etc.
A reasonably defined "efficient" market is one that will chip these differences until you have only normal profit being made while making an acceptable product. A long term super-normal profit making a commodity is the opposite of efficiency.
Brother has made exceptional printers. I have one of their small office lazer printers/scanners and it is the first time I've ever enjoyed a printer. Works great in my Linux-only house. I have it hooked up as a network printer.
>Nobody has ever made a printer exceptionally well.
My first job (in 1982) was writing barcode software for Printronix printers. They still make them now, largely unchanged [1]. They were built like a tank.
Actually I have. My current (DCP 1610-W) is better than the average but it still drops its network connection, or gets upset during a print, or stops talking to the Android app. Fine, but hardly excellent.
I'm not sure anyone is saying there's an extraordinary profit margin being made. But if you're the dominant supplier in some niche and your customers don't have any real complaints, you can still make a lot of money and, as a potential new entrant, your niche probably doesn't have a lot of appeal to me unless I have a genuinely new idea that would have broad customer appeal and I can execute on it.
At least as a consumer printer, they do seem to have emerged as a can't really go wrong option. I finally junked my inkjets because I didn't use them enough to keep the ink from drying out. I don't print a lot but I find it useful to have a printer in the house to casually print out recipes, travel info, and the like.
