Any company that did that wouldn't make it to tomorrow.
Doesn't this imply that the customer has enough information to determine which is the superior product? In reality, it's quite easy to dress up an inferior product with lots of marketing, and gain great success in the marketplace. Heck, look at Beats headphones. They're not superior in any way. Yet, by carefully crafting a marketing message, and putting massive amounts of money behind it, they've managed to get a fairly large share of the market.
If you ask a consumer whether they want a $500 product that lasts 10 years or a $200 product that lasts 2 years, they'll happily pay extra for the higher quality product. But that's not usually the choice they're presented with.
I think a solution to planned obsolescence would be to mandate prominent labelling of lifetime guarantees.
That used to be true and is an example of information asymmetry in markets - classic example being the used car market [0]. It is much less so now, when was the last time you bought anything substantial without reading a review of it or checking the customer ratings?
>If you ask a consumer whether they want a $500 product that lasts 10 years or a $200 product that lasts 2 years, they'll happily pay extra for the higher quality product.
That's not necessarily true - value decisions are more complex than that. Depending on the market, those two price points may be in different segments based on (e.g.) disposable income. Sure, for Alice, who has $500 disposable income available for a particular purchase, this might be a no brainer, but for Bob with only $200, not so much. See also Vimes' boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness [1], hyperbolic discounting [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-ri...
In some cases, you can simply conclude that an entire brand is either unreliable or trustworthy (e.g. Apple doesn't sell Walmart edition devices which break within 18 months) but in most cases you have to do a lot more research to know what level you're getting.
Besides the already mentioned point of reviews being made too soon to be able to reflect on product lifetime, keep in mind that easily available (e.g. on the shop site) on-line reviews are mostly bullshit anyway. It's mostly a mix of people being affiliated with producers or paid to endorse a product, with an occasional person which is too dumb to operate something correctly but quick to drop a 1-star rating with a nonsense explanation. To get any sensible reviews, you actually have to know some trustworthy reviewers - be it a site you follow or a friend you know. Either way, maintaining sources of trusted reviews requires some effort, so you won't be doing that for most of the product you buy anyway.
But reviews don't tend to judge product lifetime that well, because they're usually written within the first month a product comes out.
I think the only way you can get reliable information on lifetime is by forcing companies to provide it, and guarantee it. (Or put a big sticker on their product saying "0 years guaranteed")
>Depending on the market, those two price points may be in different segments based on (e.g.) disposable income.
I feel like I see a lot of reasonable sounding financing in the markets I'm thinking of, but perhaps I'm remembering times before 2008.
Of course they're doing that. They get away with it, because a) everybody else is doing that too, and b) they know that throwing money at marketing has much better ROI than making a good product. A little bullshit can paper over many faults.
Trump for example got tons of coverage. Is he "superior" to someone who may be more knowledgeable, skilled and would "make a better president" but got less coverage? The amount of advertisement, exposure, and just plain psychological manipulation matters.
Is sugary soda superior to healthy drinks? Is bottled water superior to tap water? So we as a society really need to throw away metric tons of non biogradable materials every minute?
Thinking that something wins out because it is "superior" is just confirming the free market ideology - whatever wins must be "superior" is a tautology which makes the word "superior" lose all meaning.
Yes, lots of crappy products beat products that performed better in practice, because of external and network effects.
But what we should be asking is about the correlation between a company's incentives and polluting the planet. In the main, they are pretty aligned, which is scary.
Anyway, most people have adopted the fashion cycle --something that only wealthy people would import from the fashion capital du jour.