>I was a product manager in the late 80s/90s and I needed to do competitive analysis for pricing and feature prioritization.
I've only worked at one company that really went all-out on this. Samples were bought of competitive products, tear-downs and estimates on manufacturing cost, use of ICE-machines (where practical) to understand the underlying software to some extent. All in addition to studying usage, manuals, etc. Mid 1980's.
I think it was really useful, but then they also had a QA department that was a peer to and practically as large as engineering.
There were some firms like IBM who, I'm told, had massive competitive analysis teams including doing tear-downs, etc. We were actually a fairly large company (Data General) and we still didn't do a lot beyond talking with analysts who had mostly never touched the physical product--and customers of course. This was also a period when people went to events like Comdex and returned with literally a box (or boxes) full of paper.
I joined DG a few years later than that though I knew many people in "the book" including Tom West who I sort of dotted line reported to for a time when NUMA servers were coming out. (For those who don't know what we're talking about, "Soul of a New Machine" is still one of the best books about product development ever written.)
I've only worked at one company that really went all-out on this. Samples were bought of competitive products, tear-downs and estimates on manufacturing cost, use of ICE-machines (where practical) to understand the underlying software to some extent. All in addition to studying usage, manuals, etc. Mid 1980's.
I think it was really useful, but then they also had a QA department that was a peer to and practically as large as engineering.