All I said is that they build what people will buy. Sometimes, people are short-sighted about what they buy. And maybe more importantly, landfilling is totally free in most cities, and externalities are not something markets handle well. That’s also why we’re making one-use containers out of our most permanent materials.
People absolutely did that stuff way back when, too. Incandescent lightbulbs are a debated but famous example.
Bob Robertson explains my point better than I feel like typing at this time lol. He’s spot on. Also, I worked as a project manager for the product owners that make these types of decisions. Everything I relayed was from experience. Edit: I will add, look at people like musk that proudly proclaim “i do no market research” and then look at the cybertruck.
Eh, it was a bit too detailed honestly. I doubt that was deliberate, though, and I did respond in full.
Musk is an outlier. He also bought Twitter and basically put it through a woodchipper, including getting rid of the very well-recognised brand and executing a domain transition that left it semi-broken for months. Most CEOs and most boards have some semblance of sanity.
Yeah, exactly. The early ones lasted a really long time. The debate is about how necessary making them shorter lived was exactly. It definitely happened though, and definitely did so before any of us were born.
There’s probably an even older example, but commercial history before 1850 is pretty niche.
So, how about planned obsolescence then?
What about it?
All I said is that they build what people will buy. Sometimes, people are short-sighted about what they buy. And maybe more importantly, landfilling is totally free in most cities, and externalities are not something markets handle well. That’s also why we’re making one-use containers out of our most permanent materials.
People absolutely did that stuff way back when, too. Incandescent lightbulbs are a debated but famous example.
Bob Robertson explains my point better than I feel like typing at this time lol. He’s spot on. Also, I worked as a project manager for the product owners that make these types of decisions. Everything I relayed was from experience. Edit: I will add, look at people like musk that proudly proclaim “i do no market research” and then look at the cybertruck.
Eh, it was a bit too detailed honestly. I doubt that was deliberate, though, and I did respond in full.
Musk is an outlier. He also bought Twitter and basically put it through a woodchipper, including getting rid of the very well-recognised brand and executing a domain transition that left it semi-broken for months. Most CEOs and most boards have some semblance of sanity.
They had to literally turn off Edison’s incandescent bulb. That was before planned obsolescence (see Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers) https://www.remodelormove.com/is-the-original-edison-bulb-still-working/
Yeah, exactly. The early ones lasted a really long time. The debate is about how necessary making them shorter lived was exactly. It definitely happened though, and definitely did so before any of us were born.
There’s probably an even older example, but commercial history before 1850 is pretty niche.