What were ‘made-to-last’ are now ‘made-to-break’

If you ever wondered why your phone gives you trouble after every OS upgrade and why you need to replace it every three years, the following statement from the world’s leading phone manufacturer would perhaps give you an unpalatable clue:

‘… for the purposes of our assessment, years of use, which are based on first owners, are conservatively modelled to be four years for devices and three years for watch devices. Most of our products last significantly longer, are kept current through regular software updates, and are passed along or resold by the first owner for others to use…’; an apparently very assuring statement from one of the world’s second most valuable company, which till recently was the most valuable.

However, behind this innocuous declaration on its website hides a brutal truth; its products have an average lifespan of three to four years. And this is not just for this manufacturer alone; the brutal truth is that manufacturers no longer build products that are meant to last. In fact, they are made to ‘malfunction’ after a specific time at the end of their ever shortening product life-cycles. Cautious manufacturers add a caveat that the life of the products depends on the daily usage patterns are specific to each product and are a mixture of actual and modelled customer use data.

Planned obsolescence

There is a management jargon disguising this; it’s called ‘planned obsolescence.’ In other words your expensive gadgets will start to give you all sorts of trouble after three to four years. A high repair cost, unavailability of spares, because those models have been discontinued, makes it a non-viable proposition to fix the products, so it is always better to buy the latest model. That’s what keeps the wheels of today’s manufacture and commerce running on a continuous production cycle.

It is rather intriguing that each time you upgrade the operation system on your phone or install new software patch from the original maker your gadget starts giving trouble. It either says that you are out of memory or that something is not compatible. To corporate conspiracy theorists it seems that the manufacturer is deliberately making your product go obsolete and forcing you to buy a newer model. New apps take up more space in your phone memory and make it slow and dodgy.

The Centennial Bulb

But this wasn’t always the case. Who can forget the Nokia 3310? We don't know how Nokia did it and whether it was intentional or not, but that phone is legendary! Actually, way back in the last century things were really made to last and those did last more than hundred years in some instances. In a fire department garage in Livermore (California) there is a filament light bulb, the kind that Edison created that was switched on in 1901 and trust me it burnt continuously till it was ‘laid to rest’ (not switched off) in 2015 after 115 years. It was famously known as the Centennial Bulb.

A webcam watched over it day and night and people could watch it burning bright on the webpage as living proof of durability. Durability, well that was exactly the problem. If things did not break then one wouldn’t buy new ones. And if we did not continuously keep on buying new products, how would the factories run, employment happen and profits created? Around 1924, three electric bulb companies, Osram, Philips and General Electric got together to decide that the longevity of the bulb should not be more than 1,000 hours.

Some corporate historians, of course, dismiss this as folklore. If you rummage through the internet, you would come across references to the the Phoebus cartel. It was a cartel of, among others, Osram, Philips, and General Electric from December 23, 1924 until 1939 that existed to control the manufacture and sale of light bulbs.

The cartel is an important step in the history of the global economy because it engaged in large-scale planned obsolescence. It reduced competition in the light bulb industry for almost fifteen years, and has been accused of preventing technological advances that would have produced longer-lasting light bulbs.

The Phoebus Cartel

Phoebus was a Swiss corporation named ‘Phoebus SA Compagnie Industrielle pour le Développement de l’Éclairage’. The cartel was a convenient way to lower costs and worked to standardise the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours, while at the same time raising prices without fear of competition. Members’ bulbs were regularly tested and fines were levied for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours.

The Information Technology industry is perhaps another example of continuously upgrading their products to keep coming up with newer versions that make the earlier ones obsolete, forcing users to go for the latest versions. This has also created challenges for the IT organisations themselves as they have to continuously work to deliver newer products and often cannibalise their existing version, Samsung’s rapid launches of mobile phones at a furious pace is a case in point. They have to do it with incredible swiftness to keep competition at bay, foray into new markets and increase loyalty of their existing customers.

Facebook: 500 upgrades every day

Facebook operates in perpetual development mode with hundreds of software engineers making changes to front-end systems up to 500 times a day. Amazon can deploy software changes into production in a matter of seconds. Developers at Google make more than twenty code changes a minute with up to one change every second during peak times. Netflix, for instance, has created a cloud-based IT architecture that allows its developers to launch hundreds of software changes a day.

Digital organisations are finding smarter ways to test and launch digital products and services faster, and at lower cost, by integrating their product development and IT operations, going for a continuous delivery operation. While manufacturers are forcing us to continuously replace our gadgets, they too have created a fresh challenge for themselves.

Industrial organisation would now need to transform themselves to adapt to a digital manufacturing world of automation, sensors, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to compete with enterprises that are digital natives capable of continuous launches of products or services. All of this will lead to products eventually becoming cheaper and affordable, create economic growth but those might be jobless growth in fully automated factories. That is a future that we need to think of and create solutions today. Our lives are not made for ‘planned obsolescence’.