We’ve heard stories of engines that were too efficient to be put into production. I’ve heard of some pots and pans that were virtually indestructible but once the company realized that they would be a one time buy with no repeat customers they started making them in a lower quality model.
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My organic chemistry professor in college claimed that he had been given an early model teflon muffin pan for beta testing, and that it was great, his wife was still using it ages later. He claimed that his early beta pan had too much teflon on it, and that the teflon coat was essentially indestructible, a defect they had fixed with later, more scratchable, commercially available pans.
I suspect that his wife just was using the pan without scratching it, but make of this what you will.
I think you’ve got this exactly backwards. My parents had a big, free-standing console TV that lived for approximately fifteen years. I had a TV bought in the mid-nineties that lasted through high school and college and just died about two years ago. We went to buy a new TV for our upstairs bedroom when we bought this house and were told by all and sundry that we could expect new TV purchases to last a handful of years at best; that because electronics were so cheap to produce, electronics companies nowadays care absolutely least of all about longevity and are entirely reliant on high turnover for profit. We bought the new TV after a fair amount of research on which standard TV would last the longest. It’s been about four years, and the picture on it is so dark, that unless the scene takes place in broad daylight in the center of the Mojave desert, you can’t actually see much of anything. We’ve been trying to watch Rome, but the whole thing appears to be lit with exactly two flickering torches, and mostly all we get is the audio with a few glimpses of togas.
You used to be able to have TVs repaired because there were people who knew how to do it, and enough people with reparable TVs that would pay to keep their set running. Now, it’s cheaper to toss the thing in a landfill and buy a new one for under a hundred bucks than it is to pay someone to fix it. Same with stereos and such. The CD deck in my car died one day and the only two places I could find willing to even look at it wanted to charge me $250 just to look with no guarantee of a fix or even that they’d do anything to attempt to repair it. Both advised me I’d be better off replacing the whole thing, deck and header.
I thought this sounded completely asinine, so I poked around on the 'net with a description of the problem, and almost immediately found an electronics forum with a five-year-old thread detailing this exact issue and the mechanical fix. I opened the stupid thing up, poked around with a flathead screwdriver to realign one small set of plastic cogs, screwed the box back together, and et voilà: working CD deck, and I didn’t even bill myself for the $250.
I am quite sure the technology exists to make a TV that will last a good decade or more. I am also quite sure that nothing I’m going to be able to purchase on the shelf in Target’s electronic department is going to be built with longevity in mind.
I don’t think that Alive At Both Ends has it backwards. It’s just that (a) labour in developed countries is more expensive than in developing countries, hence the relatively high cost of repairing rather than replacing, and (b) it follows that if you are in the unlucky percentage of buyers for whom things fail, you’re more screwed than you would have been before. Nevertheless, the percentage is small, and falling. TV manufacturers are motivated to make their products as reliable as possible, at the price. Bad reputation leads to less sales.
Point (a) is a good thing, for us, by the way. It reflects the qulaity of life in a developed nation. Property rights, education, etc. When other countries reach that level, hey presto, their labour rates will be as high as ours.
People tend to buy the shorter lasting products because they are cheaper, and they have no way of distinguishing them from the longer lasting products. You could shell out the extra bucks for a higher end product, but the only way you have to evaluate it is by looking at the price. I’ve had plenty of the higher end products fail quickly as well so that isn’t a good measure. By the time a product has developed a reputation for not lasting long, the company has developed a new model. Since companies are more interested in pleasing the shareholders than they are in pleasing the average customer, they produce the cheapest product they can to cut costs.
That isn’t really a technology that is being held back, it is simply producing the same technology cheaply. As far as specific technologies being held back, I can’t think of any.
And why do you think that was so? Because TVs in those days went faulty often enough that people could make a living repairing them. Nowadays, although TVs still do go faulty, the rate of failure is much lower; also the components that are most likely to fail are things like the flat screen display which are uneconomic to replace and generally impossible to repair.
This reflects what I said above. The reality is that it can take a long investigation just to establish whether the deck is fixable, and if the answer turns out to be “no” the customer will often refuse to pay anything, and the service technician has spent an hour or more working for nothing. The high up-front charges are often a way of discouraging customers from asking for repairs. The other side of the coin is that some equipment with easily fixable faults gets thrown away, as you discovered.
The sad thing is that many of these online forums are populated by exactly the people who used to run repair shops, they’re online giving advice for free because they can’t make a viable business of it any more.
About the Corningware: I think the company is telling the truth. Consumer demand probably wasn’t there. Anyone who wanted the product bought it quickly, and there would be nothing mroe than a small trickle of further purchasers to keep the income flowing. That probably wasn’t enough.
The fact that second-hand prices go up doesn’t mean there’s still serious demand, not enough to make the lines worth running again. The company would still get burned just like last time, and they know it.
OK, I’d like to see a justification for this argument. For this to be true, manufacturers would need to be depending on repeat business over new business. Other manufacturers’ products break just enough to generate repeat business without pissing off their customers. CorningWare breaks infrequently, yet fails to win word-of-mouth advertising that its products are superior. This doesn’t pass the sniff test.
I’m old enough to remember when every drugstore had a tube tester kiosk. You brought in the tube you thought was faulty and tested it. If it was bad, you looked for the number, went to the storage compartment full of replacement tubes, and bought a new one. (Or went home and brought in another tube, or a handful of them, or went around to ten more places because they didn’t have the exact tube you needed.)
There were also television repair shops filled with sets to the ceiling that were either being repaired for more extensive problems or had been abandoned by the owners and were looking for someone to buy them cheap.
Sets of the day were not at all reliable in the way we think of them now. Getting a good picture at any moment was a matter of luck and timing. Some repairs were easy and quick, true, but most meant hauling the extremely heavy set to a shop and leaving it there for weeks or else living with a poor quality picture.
Nobody would put up with this nonsense for a minute these days. We want our sets to have perfect pictures all the time from the moment we buy them till the day we replace them with a better technology. Manufacturers gear their technology to this expectation. A set is not repairable by an individual because it it all electronic and computer circuitry. But these are a thousand times more reliable than vacuum tubes. As someone said, if they fail then the whole set stops dead rather than the image being degraded, but that’s the trade-off and it’s the trade-off that 99% of consumers are more than willing to make.
When I first started buying cars in the 1970s, I got a AAA membership because the cars were always breaking down. I used to get flat tires regularly. Neither has happened to me in a decade or more. I can’t take the car to the corner gas station for repairs, and repairs are more expensive when they are needed, but that’s a trade-off that is vastly to my benefit almost all of the time.
It’s notable that nobody in this thread has come up with an actual example of a good technology being repressed, just “stories” that they’ve heard. I don’t believe that any good technology can be repressed.
I do believe that a possible technology can be rejected because it won’t meet market standards, being too expensive or too restrictive or specialized to get a mass market or too finicky to survive outside of the laboratory. That last bit happens all the time. Read any issue of Popular Science or a similar magazine for the last 50 years and you’ll find an article on the next wonder technology that never happened because it didn’t work in the real world with real customers.
Take it from somebody who remembers the 50s. Technology is infinitely, unbelievably, thoroughly better today than it was in that supposed golden age. You wouldn’t want to live there.
The “Corningware” you buy today isn’t made by Corning, nor is it the same product that Corning developed. Corning’s pyroceramic was originally used as nose cones for missiles. Its use in cookware was an accident. When Corningware first came out it was a slow hit. Corning realized that eventually the market would dry up because their product would not need replacing. So it was discontinued. Corning later sold the name to another company which resurrected it as cookware but with a different formula.
The “Corningware” you buy today breaks because it is not made from Corning’s pyroceramic cookware formula. This is from memory from an article in The Bathroom Reader, which regularly cites the SD. However, this article is not on their site. I can find the book if anyone wants more info.
Except for toasters and blenders. Other than that, great post! (remembers going with my mom to the grocery store and getting to hold the dead TV tubes while she plugged them into the tester).
Myth or reality, there’s a great movie about exactly the question in the OP: The Man in the White Suit, starring Alec Guinness as a guy who invents an indestructible textile, makes a suit out of it, and thereby runs afoul of a whole lot of people. More of a fable than a realistic story, but still very funny, and well worth a look.
I just like things that are fixable, and get frustrated when the only solution to a failing piece of equipment is to throw it away. In that respect, it’s easy to imagine that the pre-computer era was sunshine and roses for technology accessible to the average person.
I love the BBC shows that plant people in scenarios from past decades or ages in history, and lets them learn how to live limited to that technology. I wish the 1940’s era had been done a little better–because it was set in a city it was hard to really create the all-inclusive experience that the “pioneer family” or “Victorian estate” family had.
Tokyo Player, to build on Duckster’s answer: Only a fraction of the population was going to be interested in Corning’s product in the first place. I don’t know of any product that is truly universal in appeal, even if the category of product meets a universal need. So, you’re already dealing with less than 100% of the dish buying public as your market.
That market will also be further restricted by people who might have wanted your product (in this case glass dishes) but place durability below other factors (stylishness comes to mind) in their hierarchy of desirability. Then, too, if a product becomes associated with a group or age cohort, which is something else that I think that Corning’s pyroceramic dishware had happening, other age cohorts won’t go for the product, no matter how durable it might be.
For some people that very durability can be a negative: “It’ll look like I’m playing house with my grandmother’s dishes!” Then, of course, there are those of us who love our classic Corningware. But I’ve never bought any of it. I got it from my grandmother. Which, while great for me, did Corning no good whatsoever.
Having a competitive market does not automatically mean that a manufacturer with deliberately unsophisticated products gets outcompeted by those with more advanced products. Competition can also mean that you can be the most successful when your product simply doesn’t suck more than the junk that your competitors sell, as long as you can make more money from it than they can.
The Phoebus cartel had a pretty tight grip on the lightbulb industry. Formed not in spite of a competitive market but because of a too competitive market.
“The cartel served as a convenient way to lower costs and decrease the life expectancy of light bulbs, while at the same time hiking prices, without fear of competition.”
The industry realized that if you made longer-lasting bulbs, everybody makes less money. So, to protect what’s left of their own business, everybody agreed to make the same short-lived bulbs. The technology was there to produce long-lived bulbs, for essentially the same cost. But nobody wanted to sell them and be the first to ruin their profits in the long run.
You might be right about Target, but maybe not for the more “traditional” brands. We’ve got a Magnavox 31" TV that I bought over 10 years ago. It’s been used just about every single day over all that time, and we have never had any problem with it. That’s the youngster of TVs in my family. There’s also a smaller Panasonic which I bought in late 1989–a floor model at that–and it’s still working fine as well. I was single and lived alone until mid 1996, and that was my main TV during that time. My viewing habits were about average I suppose–at least a couple of hours every evening. When I got married in late 1996 I gave the TV to my parents, and now they are still using it, every day. That Panasonic has now been soldiering on for over 18 years. ( :eek: )
I have seen people throw out TVs that work perfectly well because they need to make room for a bigger and better one.
Windows is the right answer but not for your reason: OS/2 was, at the time, superior in every way, but MS outmarketted IBM, and eventually produced Windows 95 which was good enough to stop people from switching, and after Windows 2000 was released, that was that.
Which, while great for me, did Corning no good whatsoever.