What would really work?

It seems really strange to me that we live in a world where companies are compelled to design-in obsolescence into their products, to insure themselves a future market.

Nobody is interested in selling a lightbulb that lasts forever, or a car that runs forever without maintenance. Consumer electronics is a joke, with hardware that seems to magically fail the day after the warranty expires.

Obviously companies need their customers to keep buying their products, or else they'll go out of business. But sometimes I wonder if that's such a bad thing, or if it's such a realistic problem.

The promise of solid-state electronics was tremendous reliability due to no more moving parts, etc. And yet today we have all-olid-state consumer electronics that still burns out and gets completely junked, replaced with a new unit. Component-level repair work doesn't happen any more.

Would it really be so bad for the global economy if companies created products that lasted hundreds of years? Wouldn't this in fact free us to apply our creativities, imaginations, efforts to new products that no one had ever dreamed of before? Would all the craftsmen and manufacturers really run out of work to do if they made longevity and quality a key factor in their products?

Yeah, but then every company would need a dozen legit major business plans instead of one. And in today's world, they'd just do all 12 at one time before the old guy at the top kicks off and doesn't get enough time to gloat properly.

Who said that? Was that out loud?

[ QUOTE ]
highlandsun said:
Would all the craftsmen and manufacturers really run out of work to do if they made longevity and quality a key factor in their products?

[/ QUOTE ]

The short answer - yes.
My field of work is servicing photocopiers and laser printers. If you don't work in an office environment, you may not realize that there has been a completely new technology that has replaced the old-style xerographic copier process: digital photocopying. Analog type xerograhic copiers in the past were complex mechanical devices that needed very regular maintenance and emergency repairs. Very good job security for capable service techs. The digital-process copiers that have entirely replaced the analog machines do a lot of the functions electronically that were performed mechanically in older machines, and as a result have a fraction of the maintenance requirement. Our service department is about 2/3 the size of a few years ago, and still has more people than work to do. It wouldn't be that bad except we get paid partly on our productivity. Less service calls means less money in my pocket. In years past I used to take pride in not only fixing immediate problems, but I would look for and fix things that would break in the near future. I don't do that anymore - I need that machine to break in a month or two. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rant.gif

Point 2: Most consumer electronics are obsolete in 3-5 years, it's doing you a favor by breaking.

ok, ok, I feel slightly guilty for twerping off above. For legit conversational purposes, the company I work for makes office equipment that lasts tens of years at a shot. It often has to be forced out of customers hands to keep technology progress moving. But it shows that good product can be done.

Ya' ain't seen nothin' yet.

Wait until nearly every product comes with the following:

The user of the product described in the following pages is granted a license to use said product for a period of one year, renewing automatically and annually on the anniversary date of this agreement. User promises not to reverse engineer or alter this product, bearing serial number xxxxx, and agrees to maintain and keep in a state of usability during the period of license.

User agrees that the device itself is but the medium, and not the product itself. The product is exclusively the license to use said medium to achieve the purpose intended by this license. Furthermore user severely agrees to maintain a proper profile with the licensor indicating a current credit card number and expiration date, and/or a current bank account number for purposes of license fee renewal. In addition user's profile must remain current at all times, showing accurate geographical information along with phone number, name and a current complete marketing preference poll. User agrees to forfeit a penalty of 3 times the annual license fee, or $300, whichever is greater, if the terms of this license are breached.

License may be terminated by either party with written notice 30 days prior to an annual anniversary of this agreement. User must, on termination return medium, all papers and packaging in original condition, and agrees to pay a service fee equal to replacement cost or repair of said medium.

Well, you can see I'm no lawyer nor technical writer, but you get the idea.
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Empath, your point aggravates the hell out of me. I see it coming and I hate it.

re: 12 legit business plans... perhaps so. Y'know the old cliche about the Maytag repair man sitting around bored all day? That's OK with me.

Think about it for a minute. The economy is a huge machine powered by all of our earning and spending habits. Would it be so terrible if we all slowed it down a notch or two? We don't need double-digit revenue growth year-after-year if our cost of living stays flat. We don't need annual raises and bonuses, and we don't need the time-and-a-half overtime if our expenses stay flat. I'm talking about quality of life as well as quality merchandise.

Corporations are driven by their shareholders to maximize profits year after year. But what's the big deal? Aren't those shareholders people too? Don't they just turn around and spend the money again on something else?

re: consumer electronics - creating a product that goes into a landfill 3 years after purchase isn't doing *anybody* any favors. I've got a stack of 5 VCRs sitting at my house, of which only 1 still has a working mechanism. The other 4 all have perfectly good displays, tuners, power supplies, etc. Look, I'm as much of a gadget freak as anyone here on CPF, and I love having the latest and greatest technology. But new products tend to only be incremental improvements over the old; why not make things modular and let people just buy the module that actually could stand replacing?

It's a big wide world, there's plenty of interesting stuff to do. Do you really want to spend all of your life in a single career, grinding away at it? I think having more reliable equipment that requires less maintenance staff is doing *you* a favor, giving you the opportunity to pursue other things in life. And the need for maintenance never goes to zero; we can't defeat entropy.

I don't see the planned obsolescence that you do. Tungsten light bulbs are by nature short lived. If you can make one better, and convince the public it's better so they'll buy it, go ahead. You would probably have more luck trying to invent a perpetual motion machine though. Fluorescent lights are better in my opinion but most people don't buy them.

One hundred years ago people lit their homes with kerosene lamps. I'm sure you can find some in good working order. But if you use them to light your house, you had better get fire insurance, and know how to escape quickly when the house burns down.

I've had 8 or 10 computers over the last 20 years. None of them quit working. Most were replaced because newer ones were more powerful. You could probably keep the original Apple computer going for a hundred years, but why would you want to?

You won't find any 100 year old television sets but you can probably find one 50 years old that works as good as new. It will have a 13 inch black and white picture tube with a snowy picture. Is that what you want?

A farmer friend of mine plows his ground with a 7 bottom plow pulled with a 300 horsepower tractor. He has a perfectly good 100 year old plow sitting in his front yard, nicely painted. It's a walk behind plow pulled by a team of horses. The reason he doesn't use it isn't because it was designed to become obsolete.

It's new discoveries and inventions that make things obsolete in my opinion. We have countless things available to us that were undreamed of a hundred years ago. The people living one hundred years in the future (if there is still life on earth) will have no more use for our things than we have for a horse drawn plow.

I've never had a VCR but I can imagine they do wear out, but not because they were designed to wear out. If someone had made one that lasted twice as long (and they probably did) and it cost 50% more would you have bought it?
Anyway I guess DVDs are the way to go now. I'll bet that equipment lasts longer than VCRs.

Perhaps you guys should read "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler (or Tofler - not sure of spelling anymore). It talks about the 'disposable society' where everything is disposable, including apartments. We haven't gotten that far, yet. It was required reading in public school way back in the 1970s.

Marshall Brain of http://www.howstuffworks.com fame has a good set of thought provoking articles on the impact of robots on modern life:

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

"[Robots will] eliminate jobs in massive numbers. In fact, we are about to see a seismic shift in the American workforce. As a nation, we have no way to understand or handle the level of unemployment that we will see in our economy over the next several decades...."

http://marshallbrain.com

Don't ya just love these predictions? I like the one by the employee of the State Department when the Workers Paradise, a.k.a. Soviet Union collapsed. He announced that would be the end of wars for all time.

And there was the Patent Office employee around 1900 after Thomas Edison had invented so many things. He said there would be no need for the Patent Office in the future because everything that could be invented has already been invented.

Now about these robots. From whom do they take their orders? Do they change their own oil and do other maintenance on themselves, or are there more robots to do that. When they wear out do other robots throw them in the dumpster and build more robots? Does a robot know when he's over the hill and it's time to retire, or must brute force be applied?

Will robots invent their own inexhaustible and non-polluting energy source, or don't they care about pollution?
Does pollution mean the same thing to a robot as to a human?

Will robots cure global warming? Will they invent the next generation of computers? Will they run XP or Linux or will they invent their own OS? Will they detect and expunge their own viruses automatically, or will there be Dr. robots to do that? Will robots perform colonoscopies in the future? Will a robot covet thy neighbor's wife? This will be an interesting development.

I think the point being made about the robots is that they are poised to replace most or all of the low-paying jobs. If they replace 50% of all workers, major changes will occur. I don't think Mr. Brain was stating that *all* jobs will be supplanted, particularly ones requiring innovation, design and creativity.

I had no idea where this post was headed, what it was going to say, when I started it. It more or less just typed itself. I apologize now for it's overall tone.

But ...

When I first started working for the 'phone company the electro-mechanical central office I worked in required 33 full time technicians to keep it running. When I left that company that same office was all electronic and was not staffed.

That town had 23 central offices in it. These days there is a centralized monitoring location where a small staff of less than a dozen humans monitor central offices in that town and several smaller ones around it. The maintenance is done, when needed, by a technician who is dispatched to the location when a machine asks for help.

This is all fine and good, and releases a lot of folks from the drudgery of working on the older electro-mechanical machines to keep them in service. The older machines were designed to last - the Bell System one I worked in through 1979 was built in 1931, and some sections of it were moved over from the 1910 machine it replaced ... thing is, the greatest expense was the man-hours required to keep it running.

Those man-hours have been eliminated, along with the need for the people providing them.

The company is providing more services to many more customers than it did in the past, but the number of technical people it employs is less than one-tenth the number it used to.

How do those tens of thousands of ex-employees earn a living now? How do they feed their families? What does the next generation do for a living?

With the "customer service" jobs being moved to India and China, and Mexico, anywhere the vast labor pool will do the job more cheaply, what jobs will be left here? Even the hight-tech jobs - programming, engineering, etc., are moving 'off-shore' at an ever increasing rate.

Any job that doesn't require the person's physical presence can be done from anywhere in the world where it can be done cheaply. That's today's reality.

I don't know where the vast majority of the next generation's jobs are coming from, but that generation better practice relentlessly smiling while repeating the words they will need to use to compete for and keep them: "Would you like fries with that?" and "Paper or plastic?"

Welcome to your Brave New World, watch your step, stay in line, have your documents ready, and please recycle ...

Have a nice day,
/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/eek.gif
<font color="red">Where are we going ... and why am I in this handbasket?</font> /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ooo.gif