During a recent episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber shed some possible insight into the company’s view on one of its most important products. Saying that “the mouse built this house,” Faber shares the planning behind a Forever Mouse, a premium product that the company hopes will be the last you ever have to buy. There’s also a discussion about a subscription-based service and a deeper focus on AI.
For now, details on a Forever Mouse are thin, but you better believe there will be a catch. The Instant Pot was a product so good that customers rarely needed to buy another one. The company went bankrupt.
Instant Pot was a product so good that customers rarely needed to buy another one. The company went bankrupt.
Bull-fucking-shit. That’s just not how any of this works.
There are plenty of companies that make appliances that last a long fucking time, and don’t have to rely on fucking DLC micro transaction AI bullshit. The reason Instant Pot went bankrupt is the same reason a ton of popular companies have recently had issues: They got bought by private equity (who also owned Pyrex and fucked them over), saddled with a shitton of bad debt, squeezed of every bit of brand value they had, and then left to fall apart as the PE firm made off with millions.
The fact that the writer correlated “quality, durable good” with “unsuccessful business and bankruptcy” is absolutely one of the worst takes, and really shows just how pervasive this disgusting idea of “must be disposable to be profitable” really is.
Partially true, but also they wouldn’t invest in something that lasts forever (without it costing an absurd amount of money or the subscription requirement). I like this video that shows the issue pretty well. (TLDW: Communist Germany made glass so durable it didn’t break as a product to sell to the west. No company would purchase it though because they made most of their profit from selling replacements. The glass is now what we call Gorilla Glass, which is really only available on phones, which are designed to be replaced every few years anyway.)
100 years ago there was a meeting amongst lightbulb manufacturers that all collectively agreed to only design light bulbs to last about 1,000 hours. They were known as The Phoebus Cartel and Included Phillips and GE. Up until this agreement lighbulbs were typically lasting up to 2,500 hours. The manufacturers essentially created the concept of planned obsolescence because people weren’t buying as many lighbulbs as they wanted and it was decided to stop making longer lasting bulbs with higher costs. The whole thing started falling apart (competition of non members that were making bulbs, but they were all small operations, as well as patent expirations that GE had) and the start of world War two pretty much broke it up, as the Cartel couldn’t keep everything regulated and tested due to all the travel restrictions and such. But it still remains as the first global wide creation of planned obsolescence.
Extra fun fact: the common light socket screw design/size has remained the same since 1880.
That is mostly a myth. They did agree of the lifetime, but it wasn’t planned obsolescence like people act. The lifetime of a bulb is directly related to how bright it is. If you make a really dim bulb it lasts a long time, which is how that one in the firehouse is still alive. It’s so dim it’s effectively useless. The group met to decide on a luminosity target, which also is a lifespan target effectively.
