<story><title>They Used To Last 50 Years</title><url>http://recraigslist.com/2015/10/they-used-to-last-50-years/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjgoins</author><text>When I went to the first semester of engineering school at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, there was a class called Engineering Professional Development 160: Introduction to Engineering.&lt;p&gt;One of the early class sessions was a lecture from a guy at a power tool company, making some kind of jigsaw or handheld cutting tool.&lt;p&gt;He explicitly told us, paraphrasing, &amp;quot;You don&amp;#x27;t want to make your product too reliable, because people won&amp;#x27;t buy more of them, and you won&amp;#x27;t make as much money&amp;quot;. I was horrified, literally looked around at my classmates to see how horrified they would be, none of them were. I ended up majoring in philosophy.&lt;p&gt;Of course this site is dedicated to the idea he expressed, so I am not looking for agreement here, just relaying what I consider an interesting historical fact.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gommm</author><text>I had a similar experience in a mechanical engineering class, our professor was discussing MTBF (mean time between failure) and how calculating this more accurately allowed companies to better engineer their product for obsolescence. For a company, a product that is too reliable is unprofitable in the long term and so they adjust by making sure that the product works beyond the terms of the warranty but not much more.&lt;p&gt;My professor was himself horrified by that (but he was a teacher because he believed in not working for corporations so that was not very surprising)&lt;p&gt;I do know one company that has a reputation for not doing this. Miele in Europe but then their appliances are double to triple the price of typical companies.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: corrected Mean Time Between Failure instead of Mean Time Before Failure. Thanks slim</text></comment>
<story><title>They Used To Last 50 Years</title><url>http://recraigslist.com/2015/10/they-used-to-last-50-years/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjgoins</author><text>When I went to the first semester of engineering school at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, there was a class called Engineering Professional Development 160: Introduction to Engineering.&lt;p&gt;One of the early class sessions was a lecture from a guy at a power tool company, making some kind of jigsaw or handheld cutting tool.&lt;p&gt;He explicitly told us, paraphrasing, &amp;quot;You don&amp;#x27;t want to make your product too reliable, because people won&amp;#x27;t buy more of them, and you won&amp;#x27;t make as much money&amp;quot;. I was horrified, literally looked around at my classmates to see how horrified they would be, none of them were. I ended up majoring in philosophy.&lt;p&gt;Of course this site is dedicated to the idea he expressed, so I am not looking for agreement here, just relaying what I consider an interesting historical fact.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>modeopfer</author><text>I also studied engineering and I think your professor missed the point. You don&amp;#x27;t overengineer stuff anymore nowadays, not because you want to scam your consumer out of money (aka planned obsolence) but because the design tools got better and every gram of metal or plastic and every screw and every operation like welding, glueing and so on costs money.
Nowadays simulation tools, new manufacturing processes and experience allow very cheap designs that endure the predicted amount of stress but not much more. That&amp;#x27;s the trade-off.&lt;p&gt;Not every customer needs a power drill that lasts 5000 hours. Most people are okay with a cheap drill that lasts a cumulative 10 hours because that&amp;#x27;s the amount of lifetime use they get out of it.</text></comment>