Once a product is good and sells well, all the incentive goes to aggressively reducing costs (and thus making the product worse) and making sure that no other good products appear. A stable state of this situation is that every company is making low-quality products.
A certain amount of planned obsolescence can be a force for good. It makes sure that production capacity does not become stagnant and disappear. But senseless cost reduction is an atrociously bad thing.
I draw a hard moral line here: Intentionally designing failure into a product is just plain wrong.
I don't mean fail safes, like building a table saw that fires an explosive charge to stop a spinning blade when it detects the presence of a finger [0]. If some given production capacity can only be sustained by selling fresh barrels of oil converted into easily-broken home goods is it worth sustaining?
On the other hand, perishable stuff is pretty natural. If anything, it is non-perishable stuff that seems odd... There's nothing eternal in an ecosystem. Individual animals and plants die continuously and their stuff is recycled on an on. The individual cells on your body die and are replaced.
While I absolutely abhor that you cannot buy a toaster that lasts more than two years, I still see a case for well-thought-out obsolescence to be an important ingredient in sustainability.
Think about a spaceship that is moving a city to another star system for a multi-generation trip. Would you embark anything that is non-perishable? What if it breaks by accident? It is maybe better to make sure that nothing lasts more than a generation, so that there's always people having the experience to build it again (because they have already built it before).
I'm not convinced by your "moral hard line" against planned obsolescence. It is a matter of quantity: today our technology is sadly too perishable. But a (tiny) amount of planned obsolescence may still be a good thing. Just don't say it too loud :)
That’s not designing failure into a product. That’s designing a product so that when it does, it fails in specific ways. The latter is just good product design and engineering; the former is what’s arguably unethical.
Therefore, by adjusting the quality down a little bit, the company gets a bit of feedback as to how low quality a typical consumer is able to tolerate at their price point.
So i think ultimately the responsibility lies with the consumer to demand the quality they want by purchasing good quality stuff, even if it costs more, and to educate themselves to discern what is quality and what is fluff.
The issue is that higher price and promise of quality does not reflect reality once you start using the item. We paid £100+ for a cutlery set and it still stained for example.
Follow up question: can't a competitor make a kettle that's 20% better (and more profitable)? You do say that the incentive goes to "making sure that no other good products appear", but I'm not sure how a Bosch can stop a Cuisinart from making a slightly superior (and more profitable) kettle.
Maybe. A competitor, however, can’t make people pay more for a kettle that’s insufficiently marginally better.
Considering these are multinational companies doing at least tens of millions in business every year, I presume they have the expertise to do obvious market research and come to the correct conclusions about what and how much people are willing to pay for, and that is reflected in the choices you see in the marketplace.
That's a good point. Thanks. So I guess it boils down to (heh) "most consumers are happy with the existing kettles" (which could actually negate the very premise of my article.
