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| You'll never see THIS revealed in The Annual Shareholders' Report. No Sir! |
Planned obsolescence has given way to a new consumer-trapping variation on the same money-squeezing theme - I'll call it "Planned Impenetrability." Planned Impenetrability, a Lingovation sparked by my frustration with the cable modem in my house, may be defined as either 1) "The barriers imposed in the design of a device by its manufacturer which serve the principal purpose of making the device difficult to repair" or 2) "The ignorance perpetuated by manufacturers to consumers of simple ways to repair the manufacturer's devices".
Following is an article excerpt from TechRepublic's Newsletter which cites some wonderful examples of Planned Impenetrability. When you finished viewing the article, please return to this page so that the author of The Global Futurist Blog author may continue his rant.
Bill Detwiler shows you five ways manufacturers
are making our gadgets harder to fix
and gives you tips on working
around these self-repair roadblocks. Read more
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In quick summation, just a few thoughts, both good an bad, about this Planned Impenetrability Issue:are making our gadgets harder to fix
and gives you tips on working
around these self-repair roadblocks. Read more
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1) When I first had to assemble some furniture with a specialized pentagonal wrench (as opposed to the evil hexagonal wrench), my original fears about this phenomenon truly took flight. Imagine: Without that one little tool, the whole furniture kit would have been non-constructable!
2) While this tactic does create headaches and worse for consumers, it creates opportunities for new jobs and enhances the viability and importance of existing employment.
3) While the mere idea of making something that is excruciatingly difficult to repair is unsettling, it is one very negative way of ensuring customer loyalty -- for a time -- until a new hack, workaround or product comes along -- at that point, the previously entrenched technology and the company on which it rode in, will be tossed aside with gusto and epithets.
4) I predict that this propensity will increase during the next few years in the older, larger, less dynamic industries to help them to retain some element of control over their captive consumers -- I would estimate that this propensity will continue during the next three to five years, and will peak as consumers utilize social media in order to spread the word aggressively about these programmed (i.e., deliberately designed) problems and how they might be fixed cheaply and easily without fostering any further undeserved reliance upon the large corporate and industry perpetrators.
5) In the tech sector, which is presently the most active entrepreneurially and growing the fastest in the industrialized nations (as is the basic service sector in the less-developed nations), the focus will change from complexity to simplicity, and products and service packages will be sold to either fix problems cheaply, or with designed simplicity built in.
Perhaps this will be the "Magic Jack" revolution, where the power shifts from service provider/ problem creators to service provider/ problem-solvers. I believe that the timing of this departure from the annoying trend of the present will be slightly ahead of the forecast described in item numbered 3), above and that this shift toward problem-solving as a way of capturing market share as opposed to problem-creating as a means of holding market share captive will drive the change described in item numbered 3).
The climate of increasing consumer mistrust and resentment of the monopolistic or dominant territorial service providers will not significantly impact the planned obsolesce tactic and its inculcated mentality, but that it will drive market share and responsive innovation in the general direction of solution providers and companies which are, in effect, winning market share with quality instead of ritualistically hog-tying an enslaving existing market share with brute force and dangerous, expensive dependencies.
Douglas E. Castle for The Global Futurist Blog and the Daily Burst Of Brilliance Blog
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