Skip to main content

Built-in Obsolescence


Wikipedia defines the practice fairly neatly and goes on to express the potential boons and pitfalls for any market participant attempting such a tactic.

It's all about public relations, dog! Mess up your public image and you invite abandonment by your customers. They can always go elsewhere for their kicks and customers ( particularly if they're consumers ) ain't the loyal little bears they once were. At least that's what all the consultancies (Boston CG, McKinsey, Bain, etc...) keep saying.

But it's a big problem, right? What do we do about big problems? Well, this guy has it figured out. Lower your quality of life now, or else!

Built-in or planned obsolescence obviously doesn't exist and Matt Tanous, an actual engineer, explains why the concept is a fantasy.

In short, reputation on the one hand plus actual technology considerations on the other. The reputation stuff goes back to what's in the Wiki article, but the tech stuff concerns increasing complexity of electronics and the compacting of ever more components into the same space in every successive generation of, say, iphones.

Done.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Private Ownership and the Emergence of Field-based Agriculture

Quick update: There is a nicer, fancier article on this very subject on another blog. If for some reason you read my article below, treat yourself and partake of properal's piece too . ~~~ There is a paper by Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi called 'Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene' and it is wonderful. It leaves a few stones unturned and its thesis needs to be empirically verified or falsified but it really begins to clarify the intimate relationship between the form of agriculture that we refer to as farming on the one hand and private ownership on the other. Their thesis is that technology was not the driver that led to long-term (inter-generational) farming, but also that farming did not follow some moment where the folks in a society all said "hey, let's all have private property now!" Rather, what they posit is that farming and private property actually coalesced, ad-hoc and over a multi-generational time-fram...

I AM AN AUSTRIAN

Is it so wrong? Really? Just humour me, dudes and dudettes. I am an Austrian. I am a Libertarian. I am an Austro-Libertarian. I'm evidently also a hypocrite, as I've used most of these words without capitals in past posts. Oops. I've made Austrian economics my home because it accords better with certain concerns of mine; why have a subjective theory of value and then lump desires and capacities into aggregates? Why declare that economic facts can be gleaned from the movements of particular markets at particular times in the past? Rothbard sums up the problem with both phenomena in a way that no mainstream economist ever would, since to do so would be to admit that there are entire fields of modern economics that are, at best, pointless, and at worst, harmful. NOT MAINSTREAM? Why is Austrian economics not mainstream? It rejects the efficacy of aggregates and mathematical formulae to arrive at economic truths. According to the Austrian worldview,...

1318 - The Evil Capitalists Own Your Mom!

The New Scientist ran a piece  on the economic relationships between the 43,060 transnational corporations in the world as of 2007. It turns out that 147 of 'em are thick as thieves, which each of those 147 entirely owned by one or more of the others within that clique. Naturally some anti-capitalists have decided that this proliferation of tight interconnections constitutes the proof that not buying what someone's selling will fail to put that seller out of business. Takes all sorts to make a world, brah. Is concentration scary in itself? No; John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability. Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core’s tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable . “If one [compan...