Hey! No Windows talk. We agreed that.
I didn’t realize why so many people immediately thought of Windows until I took another, closer, look at the thead title.
c:\> forget windows
This is not the command you are looking for.
One thing that definitely happens is the reduction in quality in favor of cheapness. When re-usable grocery totes became widespread, they were made out of strong canvas, they had shoulder straps, and could carry just about anything you were strong enough to lift. But now they are often made of plastic, have no shoulder straps, and have handles that tear off if you try to load them too heavily.
We’ve had the same cash register in our store for twenty or so years. We had a repairman in because we couldn’t figure out how to replace the ink cartridge and he said the brand (a Japanese brand) wasn’t sold anymore by Irish vendors because they didn’t break often enough. He made his money from people having problems and repeat visits rather than on the initial sale.
What the hell is a “grocery tote”? You mean a shopping bag? Those reusable bags are great and all that, but one has to wonder about the environmental impact, or lack of.
True Story! For years my wife still had her mother’s old cast-iron frying pan- the one without a handle because it had broken off when she (wife’s mom) hit her husband with it. It must have been better than forty years old when we finally had to toss it because the bottom developed a crack so it leaked. And at that, it had been cleaned with steel wool and scouring powder for decades; if the metal had been kept protected with a proper seasoning, we might still have it.
The standard lifetime of a mass-market lightbulb still is 1000 hours. Surely we learned to make more advanced bulbs since 1939? Even if the cartel is formally dead, the underlying market dynamics survive.
- The cheaper a product, the more people buy it. 2) The more durable a product, the more people buy it. 3) Production costs and net profit. — Depending on the relative proportions between these factors, there may be a crossover point where you can make more money from more people for a lower-grade product. Thus, you decide to keep your product simple so you can sell it cheap and often.
You win anyway, because there won’t be a seller with a better product. Because your competitors, too, of course, figured out that they want to make more money from more people. Which they can’t necessarily always get by making better products.
Two things:
[ul]
[li]Windows is only a monopoly in a small world. The desktop computer is a fraction of the total computers in existence, and the majority of the rest don’t run Windows.[/li][li]You’re ignoring the whole concept of lock-in. Microsoft has made a lot of money by making it too expensive for current customers to switch, which allows it to get away with debacles like Windows Me. Lock-in very effectively distorts the market.[/li][/ul]How about one of my favorite examples? Betamax lost to VHS because VHS WAS BETTER. Beta’s supposed superior quality was not perceivable on the TVs of the era and VHS had a much longer recording capacity, leading to a much lower cost for recording movies and sports games on VHS compared to Beta. (Cite.) VHS was the rational choice for reasons that had nothing to do with either porn or the ways in which Beta was better.
The moral of the story is that you have to look at the whole picture before you decide which technology is better.
This is only half the picture. There are always levels of markets for any given product. Most can be sorted into a basic three: products that are as cheap as possible, luxury items that contain as much quality as possible, and a large middle ground where a variety of trade-offs are made between price and quality.
Not only do markets segment like this, but you can find the three categories in most large department stores or category stores. (Is is Target that has Good, Better, and Best product lines?)
All conspiracy theories about the lack of availability of products because manufacturers don’t want to make durable goods fall before this market segmentation. If you can get a wonderful feature, someone will put it out as a luxury item for those who don’t care about price. Once the feature is out and known, there will be competitive pressure to incorporate that feature into the middle of the line goods. We know this happens because that’s exactly how all the advances made over the years that I talked about earlier came to pass. You saw them first in super-high-priced luxury goods, then they spread to the middle class products. Finally they appeared in cheap commodity items, by which time the luxury goods had a new set of features.
There is always a market for better products. You can always make money by catering to the wealthy. You may not make the same billions that Wal-Mart makes, but you can make millions and that’s enough to attract manufacturers and retailers.
Conspiracies are mythical because people will chase every pot of dollars out there. A corner grocery or diner may not make billions but if it makes money it feeds a family. You scale that up to any size you want and there always will be a entry point for someone to make money at. That’s why businesses of every possible size exist.
I can’t respond to the first part, because I promised not to bang on about Windows in this thread. But I agree that the “Betamax was better” thing is a myth, and people need to be told.
We’ve had some opinions but nobody’s offered any stats about TV reliability. Old TVs were repaired because it was cost effective to repair them. Up to a certain size newer TVs are not. That doesn’t tell us any stats on how often they break down. A certain percentage of electronics break down. That’s the nature of manufacturing.
I really don’t think that relates much to the OP.
Now this seems to be a prime example of what I’m talking about. Better technology that was not only squelched by one company but by companies working together.
In a non technology related business it reminds me of credit card companies and their policies.
Another possibly related example. Years ago midi language {Musical Instrument Digital Interface} was not universal. Different companies had their own language and you had to stick with their products for devices to communicate properly. In 1983 companies collaborated on a midi standard so devices from various companies could communicate. That’s an example of cooperation that made devices more user friendly in spite of competition.
Working in electronics for a while one royal pain in the ass is power adapters. It one thing that hasn’t been standardized and is a big hassle for consumers and retail merchants. Companies make some profit from selling replacement parts and power adapters are fairly expensive. If they made them more uniform it would be much easier for retail outlets to stock them and much easier for consumers to find a replacement adapter.
Nonsense. Every single commodity in the U.S. was organized into a cartel or trust at some point between the last part of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century. Some were broken up by the government, but the rest fell apart under their own weight or by end runs by non-cartel members who saw opportunities for making money. Probably the most famous example is the way the movie trust was destroyed by small independents who went out to Hollywood and started cranking out pictures illegally on film stock that as begged, borrowed, or stolen.
Light bulbs are a particularly poor example, in fact. Poor for you side, that is, good for mine.
Better performing light bulbs have been freely available for years, not just expensive long-life or “forever” light bulbs (long since available) but non-incandescent bulbs made using better technologies. With recent rises in green awareness and electricity prices, compact fluorescents have dropped greatly in price as they moved from luxury items to mid-level goods that take advantage of the economies of scale of mass production. But even so, they are being replaced at the higher end by a host of other technologies, like LEDs and halogen bulbs and others. Often, increased life or quality of an existing mass produced item is not worth the investment. Putting out new technology that does away with the old entirely creates the new niche.
That’s why repressing advances is a myth. Any advantage gained from repressing one technology provides incentives for new technology to supersede it.
Nobody has come up with even a single example of a true repressed technology yet. Certainly not light bulbs.
Brian Winston’s *Media, Technology & Society * (1998) is an interesting treatise on the advancement of communications technology that the OP might want be interested in tracking down.
The points I brought up are tangential to Windows.
The first is perception versus reality: People think Windows owns a lot more of the market than it does because they don’t see a good deal of the computers in the world. They don’t realize how many computers their own home contains, for example, and they certainly never come across a colo company’s rack-mounted servers or a big bank’s mainframes. They think “nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft” much like a previous generation thought “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. This is a risk-management strategy: Failing the same way as everyone else is more acceptable in a big company than finding a new way to screw up. It also ties directly in to my next point.
The second is lock-in: Standards, both written and de facto, exert a huge influence on the market. Hydrogen cars face a substantial handicap because the de facto standard is gasoline and diesel, so the infrastructure to move large amounts of hydrogen around doesn’t exist and people don’t know quite what to make of [del]Hindenburg[/del] hydrogen gas. DTV is only coming into existence because the broadcast TV market is ultimately founded on ex cathedra pronouncements from the FCC; otherwise, DTV would never unseat NTSC simply because the NTSC installed base is so huge. Standards distort the market in that they exert a substantial, gravity-like influence on what decisions are rational.
It sounds like you’re saying there are attempts at suppressing good technology that meet with limited success but eventually, and inevitably, fail. Is that correct?
Eventually, yes. Better technologies always supersede old ones, eventually. All cartels fall apart, eventually. In the meanwhile, everybody keeps trying to squeeze as much money out of their own little market share as possible, by whatever means necessary. If it’s more lucrative for the mass market to stick with old technology, so be it.
Comparing completely different technologies from completely different eras doesn’t really prove the point. Sure, LEDs or fluorescents will eventually kill the lightbulb market, but let’s stay focused specifically on the lightbulb era.
It’s true enough, long-lived bulbs have always been available in the higher market segment. We know that the technology to make 5000-hour bulbs for the same costs as 1000-hour bulbs existed at least since the 1930s. Yet the bulk market did not adapt to it. For decades. Wouldn’t competitive technological pressure predict exactly the opposite?
The lightbulb cartel wasn’t formed because manufacturers wanted to put pressure on the market. It was the other way around, the economic pressure existed first. Because they could, manufacturers formed a cartel instead of selling better products for less profit. Regardless of this - fact remains that nobody can make a living with Everlasting Gobstoppers.
Not if the competitive pressure is outweighed by a much greater financial pressure from selling fewer products. New features and better technology usually mean that you sell more, but not always. By the same reasoning, the exact same dynamics of cost and demand which usually make new technologies seep down from the higher into the lower segments can also work to push advanced technology out of the bulk market and keep it exclusively restricted to the overpriced segment.
That’s how I took it. Superior technology won’t be suppressed indefinitely {we hope}
but it is suppressed at times for the sake of profit. Light bulbs seems minor but I think the principle can also apply to other more significant technologies that have a more serious impact on human lives. Technologies about low cost energy etc.
Yes, please find the book if you can.
Discontinuing a product line, selling the brand name to a difference company, which makes the product with a different formula, is a world of difference between having the same company purposely making an inferior product, as implied in the previous post.
It could very well be that Corning agreed to sell just the name and not the formula, or that the new company and Corning couldn’t agree on the price of the formula. Without more information, the assertion that other company is intentionally making an inferior product cannot be made with certainty.
Second, the problem I have with the section I bolded is that if sales were still going strong, there wouldn’t be a need to discontinue the line at that time. If a product has maxed the market out, then it would be withdrawn, but you don’t prematurely kill a money-making product. It could be that they had already reached saturation or that not enough people were buying their product.