Semi-monopoly ramblings through the lens of Swiss Army Knife sub-market or something.

I lost track of how I initially wanted to express my thoughts about the subject, owing to the fact Uni's been getting to me again, so please bear with me.

I like Swiss Army Knives. It''s a quality I've undoubtedly from my late grandpa, since there didn't seem to be anyone else interested around. Although he seemed to be more of a fan of pocket knives in general, he couldn't have been ignorant to them, certainly not for his entire live, as they've been at the top of the field since well before his time.
With that amount of time, and with one of the two companies making them being bought by the other, you'd expect the entity behind them - Victorinox to be damn well adjusted for the market, and you'd not be wrong, but there's quite a lot of depth behind that fact:
For one - Swiss Army Knife is in a class of it's own. It's both a knife and a multitool but it's neither of them to it's fullest, at least according to many. This largely manifests by complete immunity to certain trends/qualities of either of the two, chiefs among them being steel of low base hardness, tools not locking (being free to collapse by simply reverting the opening process, which arguably leaves room for them to collapse onto users fingers upon an accidental movement of the wrist) and the main blade requiring both hands to open. I don't believe I need to speculate why, as I'm sure it won't be much of a surprise to most of you reading, but pretty much no one in the market for one cares. Those who do are either not interested or are getting a separate dedicated knife a "main one" and move on. The reason actually boils down to the fact that over the years they mastered the art of good enough. So much so that they, as did their rival Wenger before the merger - offer lifetime warranty, a pretty good indicator that they are more likely to get lost than broken in my eyes.
So all this is what keeps them a market leader, in fact the borderline only player in this weird sub-market living in between pocket knives and multitools. Tough a good few competitor do exist and keep appearing they pale in numbers. What is it then that drives such a market? Their products still need a price point and there is literally nobody that could serve as a reference to them, as for most manufacturers, in fact of both multitools and pocketknives as well - they are the monolith. Well they are the reference. One model in particular being the top example of that - the Compact, a model I elected to get and thus own. Compact is has two tool layers, one for knife and universal opener and one for scissors. they both have tools on the other side as well but they are not important enough to discuss. Compact shares most of it's core functionality with Hiker, a model which is wider owing to the fact that it has separate openers for bottles and cans, as well as a secondary blade, it does however still have their excellent scissors. So it's almost the same functionality, exactly 2mm of difference in size and about 125% of the price of the Hiker, or Super Tinker, which is identical to the hiker just replacing it's cork screw with a phillips screw driver. Compact is valued at so much more that it's pricier than their 4 layer equivalents, both of which add a saw to the package. How come? Well one could say that some of it is to do with the fact the sides of Compact hold a tiny pen in addition to the usual toothpick and tweezers and it's corkscrew comes with a tiny screw driver for glasses, or that one of the tools on the other side had a nail file added to it but at the scale of the market leader that's not a valid excuse for a 1/4 in price increase, when less raw material is getting used. It's an accepted fact that Compact's price is driven up by high interest and the extras are there to make the deal more appealing. It worked on me, and I don't regret it, even tough for a moment I thought I might. It's currently not even the only example, but I'm not gonna get into talking about Companion.
I will instead go to he opposite end of the reasonable portion of size spectrum, to Victorinoxes flagship - the Swiss Camp. 8 layers consisting of one for two blades, a saw, a nail/metal file, a set of scissors, a set of tiny pliers, a fish scaler / ruler, a phillips screwdriver + magnifying glass (those, for the record are both on the main side, as opposed to the opposite one), and the same two openers as on Hiker. But 8 layers is a lot, so one might be tempted to consider the second in like - the Handyman. Handyman has 6 layers. While not much, room was made by doing the logical thing and removing the fish tool. Problem starts however with the fact that the other removal although wider was the screw driver. It could be moved to the other side, like a tinker. Sure the position is more awkward but usable, and in fact probably better for the edge case that are wood screws. The issue is they did not do that. Handyman, like most other genuine Swiss Army Knives has a corkscrew where that phillips would be, so aside room the fact that the flat screw driver on top of the can opener was deliberately made to fit a size 1 phillips (a saving grace for this one and many others) the tool doesn't have a proper rendition of the worlds most popular screw driver shape. Here is where tinkering might help. This is a pun, because you can modify a swiss army knife, and one of the things one can do is to get the screw driver from the cheapest, simplest tinker and put it in the Handyman.
This lead us to the main catalyst for this post. Issue 1: this makes the process more expensive then Swiss Champ, even before the labor cost. But you still have leftovers and combining the remnants of the tinker with the corkscrew gives you another model - Spartan. This is Issue Number 2: It costs the same as Tinker. To you that's a decent deal, arguably much improved usability for the price of shipping, but from the perspective of the company in question this creates a bit of a paradox. It's reasonable enough to assume they didn't make a screwdriver version of Handyman to incentivise investment into Swiss Camp, if for no other reason than it having more stuff serves to better advertise them, but thanks to the power of reseling that could go out of the window. The question of "would they have a reason to care" is a good one, but so is "do they have a good reason to keep the corkscrew as the default, when it disrupts the handle more". The way that issue solves itself seems robust enough tho and it's the fact modded too,s do not fall under their warranty, and as I mentioned it is a very good one. This is unlikely to affect the newly created Spartan, as it should not be meaningfully different than originals, so re-selling it should be perfectly morally fine, and those wishing to perform or order the mod can fall back to the idea that losing the tool is more likely than braking it, however it being worth the money and loss of warranty is questionable at best and indeed I have not seen such a mod be performed on a Handyman.
I did however see it done (more or less) on a Compact. Compact which as I briefly mentioned has no can opener, meaning there are no phillips screwdrivers on the compact. Kinda. People keep claiming the universal opener can be used as such but I've never seen it being attempted. This is probably the larger of the two ways to cripple compact performance. Sure storing things in the corkscrew is cool, but I don't think anyone can argue that it's enough to justify it's inclusion over the worlds most popular screwdriver shape. And the price of that mod fairs arguably worse than Handyman's.
With all that being said,what exactly is it that that compels Victorinox to suppress their arguably best knife? we can only speculate but the consensus is "they want other products to sell too, and they serve as each others only competition" at least as far as very surface-level reasoning goes, but dipping toes just beyond, or rather below that surface lies a more cynical version of a potential reason "they want to sell more tools even to those same people, and there's no one who could even attempt to stop them". We really have no way of knowing which it is.

That;s about it, I would love to bring any other companies as examples, but the only one that even comes to mind as far as being in similar position goes is Lego, and I don't know if it does anything applicable.

Lastly I'd like to say that for all of it' problems Victorinox has no causes for concern, of note here is that they just announced a full sized Swiss Army Knife with no knife. It's a good thing that the polish term for that sort of tool makes no references to Knives

Lastly I'm just gonna confess I've got no summary for this, it was entirely freeform and I am falling asleep on my keyboard, so I'm just gonna cut it here. See ya around.