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Comment by sillyquiet | Hacker News Reader

I think Maytag is another example of what I think of as the attitude of profit margin >>> artisanry in modern companies. It goes something like this:

Company A makes a thing, maybe it was founded by the inventor of the thing, maybe not, but it makes a thing and it is PROUD to make the thing. The thing is reliable, durable, and it does what it is advertised to do, well. It's crafted with care, with QA and built with quality parts.

And THEN the beancounters come in. Oh-ho, they say, you can increase your profit margin on every unit sold if you replace this FooPart with a cheaply made mass produced overseas equivalent.

Also, we will reduce the number of expensive quality inspectors to save costs.

Actually, we are outsourcing ALL labor to overseas to save costs,

and etc etc, the cost of the unit probably doesn't decrease, but the profit margins sure look nice until the point confidence in the product collapses and sales tank.

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By the time the sales tank, the CEO is long gone with the bonuses they got for increased profit.

You forgot the make it smart/app based/subscription model!!

The scary thing is they can only do that because it sells. Plenty of people like the "new". I think much of that movement is the opposite of sustainability. Software-based products will have even shorter lifetimes.

Even if some cloud service is not needed and it works with "only" a local app on your phone, the phones change quickly and even the OS. Even with backwards compatibility, ten years of lifetime already is ambitious. Devices used to have decades of lifetime. Electronics shortened it, computing elements more so, and now software. The cycles got shorter. The construction also got more and more flimsy. All the devices I got from my grandparents are still usable (cooking, mechanical calculator, photo, film), the more modern it is the less metal and the more cheap plastics that does not age well.

If we had an efficient recycling system, and renewable energy to power the entire cycle it would be doable albeit still wasteful. But we have neither. The cycle is mostly fueled with fossil fuels, adding more and more carbon from deep below ground, and containing the energy of the ancient sun, to the surface carbon cycle. It is not circular, the end products end up dumped somewhere.

Yeah, and I also forgot the 'let's make sure the thing is an unrepairable black box, so make sure all manuals, part numbers, and diagrams are locked behind copyright, let's sue anybody on You-tube showing people how to modify or repair the thing, and let's be sure to add features and fixes only to Thing 2.0 Thing-as-a-service'

John Deere would be turning over in his grave … over his tractors.

At that point we would all be better off if the washing machine design was just open source, since then there would be actual competition among clones, and companies hungry for profit willing to build a brand with some reputation for quality who will do actual Q/A, and when they break parts are available from multiple vendors, and the industry will converge on standard designs for certain major parts.

It's actually intellectual property restrictions that make possible the kind of scam business model you described. And I think without them we would see the cost of living go down as major goods got cloned and extra costs were shaken out of the designs. 3D printers got 100x cheaper in ten years after the patents expired, and I think this principle can generalize.

But without IP you can’t get capital behind ideas and then everything grinds to a halt. In reality, the consumer is to blame completely. If there was an appetite for engineering teardowns of products (AvE style) or in other words if the consumer were actually discerning then the market would reflect that.

> without IP you can’t get capital behind ideas and then everything grinds to a halt

Citation needed. Open source development proves that IP restrictions are not necessary to produce engineering development. And look at 3D printers. Their price went from $50k to $25k after the first ten years on the market, when they were under patent. When the patent expired, development exploded and ten years later the price had dropped to $250. One of the most popular 3D printers in the world, the Prusa i3, is completely open source. Certainly one cannot say that "without IP... everything grinds to a halt" when faced with these examples.

This is simply objectively wrong. You think the economy can be driven by volunteers? You think capitol allocated with no reward function will produce anything? And 3D printers went down in price because they became a popular diy hobby not because the patents were freed from the shackles of capitalism you dunce…

Do you know how they became a popular hobby? The patents expired and enthusiasts started to design cheap printers. That is literally the origin of the hobby, I know because I was there. Commercial printers still cost $20,000 when hobby printers broke the $1k mark, which was obviously couldn’t have happened if they were still patented.

I’m not saying the economy can be run by volunteers. Engineers at Prusa are not volunteers, they get paid. And they make their designs all open source. They do not need intellectual property restrictions to make their product viable.

I’m sorry for being so rude. But I disagree. I was there too I guess, i built my own prusa in 2011. I just don’t believe that patents stopped people from designing and building open source 3D printers. The early printers were just brass nozzles with a heat element, thermistor, motors belts and an arduino. There’s no patent roadblocks in there. There is a correlation, however, with the hobby computer revolution of the early 2010s…

Yes there was a patent roadblock. The very process of laying down layers of filament to build a model was patented until 2009. Before that people could get in trouble for duplicating those designs. But afterward people could openly collaborate. DIY 3D printers exploded once people were allowed to develop them. And I remember being in the 3D printer groups and seeing people unwilling to infringe on the belt 3D printer patent that makerbot had, for example. Hobbyists were aware of patents and weary of infringement. I built my first printer in 2011 too.

EDIT: Here is an interview with the creator of the first hobby 3D printer. In Europe, unlike the US, research projects are allowed to violate patents. He explicitly calls out the expiration of the patents as the thing that allowed them to expand beyond just research. https://www.3dsourced.com/interviews/reprap-dr-adrian-bowyer...

“We never had any problem with Stratasys complaining about what we were doing, there was only one thing that happened: we got a letter, very nice and very polite, very conciliatory, from one of their legal people saying they had a trademark on the term FDM and could we please not use it, so immediately I invented an equivalent term, which was FFF and we just edited everything on the site to that instead. That’s the only time they tried to interfere or anything else with the project. They never complained we were infringing upon their patent, which we weren’t of course [research projects in Europe can research a patented technology for the purpose of improving it without any kind of patent infringement], and we weren’t selling any machines.

“Once the patent expired in 2009, of course the project was free to do whatever it liked. Coincidentally, that was just a few months after we got the first printer working. It all came together fairly nicely in that regard.”

If patents didn't incentivize the development of 3D printing technology in the first place, we might still not have them. You're overlooking the fact that IP drives initial research and development in the first place.

I’m not overlooking it, I just don’t think it’s true. Even when the process was patented multiple groups had the idea (IBM and stratasys both held patents and had to collaborate). Without IP there is still market incentives to sell new technology. I don’t believe the myth that without patents people would not innovate. I think innovation would happen faster!

s/beancounters/investors/

Just sayin'. It's not the Accountants, it's the Business majors hired by the investors that are the issue. At the end of the day, its the investment firms and the endless churn to increase profit year over year that does this.

sure sure - it's unfair of me, but I call decision makers of all stripes - c-levels, etc - who are only motivated by short term numbers on a spreadsheet 'beancounters'

My observation is you have the order wrong and the cost cutting is just an attempt at delaying the inevitable.

- Company founded and makes quality product

- Company stagnates, doesn’t innovate, falls behind.

- New CEO can’t fix this, so turns “reliable” brand into “lowest cost brand” to preserve sales.

- Company goes bust anyways

Most companies that have a solid reputation can make more money selling at a higher price point and having bigger margins than the cheaper outsourced competitor.

I’ve been in a few companies like this - the aggressive cost cutting almost always happens after sales have started to tank. When sales are good, everyone is fat and happy and not looking to stir the pot.

Particularly in the context of washing machines, I find this a little hard to swallow. What constant innovation is needed here? The product is infrequently replaced, and mainly just needs to do the one thing it already does.

Sure you have changes - you end up with a few major variations like top- and side-loaders and all that. But the old style doesn't fall off the face of the earth. And companies have plenty of time to simply watch and imitate.

Don’t mistake your product preferences for the average consumer.

Some people will select a washer based on the available color scheme or some “anti-bacterial” setting.

Or it can be as simple as “that washer is 20% cheaper, I don’t care if it doesn’t last as long”.

This is bit of a chicken-or-the-egg question - which came first, those customer preferences, or advertising insisting you 'need' the stainless steel washer to keep up with the Joneses which created the customer preferences.

It is, but it’s also likely a consequence of increasing disposable income. These appliances are also much cheaper (as a percent of income) than they used to be.

They went from “major purchase that should last a decade” to “we’ll get a new one if this breaks”.

Agreed and your comment reminded me of an old documentary about Edward Bernays the nephew of Sigmund Freud that heavily influences companies around the world in marketing and PR opaganda. [1] The video is black-and-white and long but I would suggest the first hour or so is worth the watch. It makes many cases describing how people are convinced they must buy the thing they don't need.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s [ video ]

That's kind of what I mean though. None of those are particularly innovative and certainly aren't going to end up somehow protected. It wouldn't be hard to just follow along. In the time it takes to do that, a small fraction of the user base will have actually purchased a new machine. The majority of all customers will never even know the other company actually came up with that cool color scheme/whatever first. Not that they'd care if they did.

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