Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 246 posts

Re: How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world

#221

Post by pathikrit »

bane wrote: post #150

I don't buy much IKEA furniture, very little of it survives even a single move, and for the price you can find plenty of furniture that does. So it ends up not being a great investment, except for a few very specific, highly optimized pieces. I have 6 Billys and my parents have something like 10. When I worked at a small startup and needed to fit out some field offices, I bought two things from the store, a Galant de…

Honest question: If I want the diversity of a Ikea catalogue with higher price and quality, where should I go?

Re: How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world

#222

Post by schwap »

Magi604 wrote: post #214

Another Ikea superstar is the Lack table (the small square one). Sturdy, functional, easy to assemble, cheap, stackable (using glue), comes in different colors, can be easily disassembled and tucked away when not needed.

Also almost the exact width (between the legs) of a server rack -- hence the "Lack Rack"[1]

[1]https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack

Re: How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world

#223

Post by toufka »

DannyBee wrote: post #136
computator wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real reason is simply that nobody wants it. Could you expand on that? Obviously people do want Ikea, so why wouldn't people want mass-produced really-good furniture?

Sure. Let's look at some of the major pieces of furniture people have: Tables, cabinets, chairs. It's the same story with all of them. Let's start with cabinets. A bit of cheating since most people don't consider it furniture, but worth talking about. Most people want white or colored cabinets. The "natural wood" look is mostly out of style these days, due to mass over-production of red-oak cabinets (and thank god. t…

This quality/price curve you describe seems to come about naturally now in our world of mass-produced things. Cameras, Furniture, housing construction, appliances, cars, etc. It's straightforward to find 'crappy', and 'nicer crappy', it's reasonable to find 'truly premium', and it's very difficult to find 'solid, but not quite premium'.

There is definitely a hollowing out of the middle ground, and I think you are correct in that much of it comes from a lack of informed customer base. Only a fleeting few are willing to educate themselves to recognize the difference between 'nicer crappy' and 'solid' even if in a well-informed market they should be about the same price.

Re: How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world

#225

Post by Kenji »

onion2k wrote: post #64
Kenji wrote: post #61

>I’m Glenn Fiedler and I’ve been a game developer for the last 15 years. If he is in the scene for so long, he should know about the timing problems in browsers: The JavaScript VM can schedule your game any time it likes and it's pretty much impossible to get consistent framerates across all browsers. As someone who has developed a variety of JavaScript games - I will not do it again until we get more powerful and ac…

To be fair to browsers, it's impossible to get consistent frame rates on anything . That's why games rely on the delta between frames instead of constant values.

Obviously, I know about deltas. That doesn't fix visual stuttering because frames miss.

Re: How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world

#226

Post by j2bax »

mcv wrote: post #169
bane wrote: post #150

I don't buy much IKEA furniture, very little of it survives even a single move, and for the price you can find plenty of furniture that does. So it ends up not being a great investment, except for a few very specific, highly optimized pieces. I have 6 Billys and my parents have something like 10. When I worked at a small startup and needed to fit out some field offices, I bought two things from the store, a Galant de…

Your first paragraph seems to contradict the rest of your story. It's absolutely true that some IKEA stuff is very low quality. Like the Billy: the shelves of the wide Billy sag when you put too many books on them. But IKEA also has higher quality furniture from solid wood. More expensive of course, but also sturdier. They're designing for various quality/price points. I once had a really sturdy IKEA desk, either Gal…

Parent mentioned at the end of the first paragraph that there were a couple products from IKEA that didn't fit his overall feelings about their quality, he then went on for the rest of his post to talk about those couple of stand out amazingly designed/built products.

Re: How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world

#227

Post by freehunter »

Gravityloss wrote: post #209
bane wrote: post #150

I don't buy much IKEA furniture, very little of it survives even a single move, and for the price you can find plenty of furniture that does. So it ends up not being a great investment, except for a few very specific, highly optimized pieces. I have 6 Billys and my parents have something like 10. When I worked at a small startup and needed to fit out some field offices, I bought two things from the store, a Galant de…

The Galant desks are not sturdy. I would not dare to stand on one. First of all, if you use the telescoping legs, the locking mechanism is plastic IIRC and can't take a lot of load. But even just the actual desk surface: I think it's a sandwich of paper honeycomb with a very thin veneer and bends a lot even when someone's just sitting on it. It would probably just break in half if you stood on it. It is light so that…

While I fully expect my current (non-Ikea) desk would support my weight if I sat or stood on it, I've never actually considered doing that. Is sitting/standing on desks a common activity? My desk just supports my laptop and an external monitor.

Re: How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world

#228

Post by freehunter »

mcv wrote: post #169
bane wrote: post #150

I don't buy much IKEA furniture, very little of it survives even a single move, and for the price you can find plenty of furniture that does. So it ends up not being a great investment, except for a few very specific, highly optimized pieces. I have 6 Billys and my parents have something like 10. When I worked at a small startup and needed to fit out some field offices, I bought two things from the store, a Galant de…

Your first paragraph seems to contradict the rest of your story. It's absolutely true that some IKEA stuff is very low quality. Like the Billy: the shelves of the wide Billy sag when you put too many books on them. But IKEA also has higher quality furniture from solid wood. More expensive of course, but also sturdier. They're designing for various quality/price points. I once had a really sturdy IKEA desk, either Gal…

>Your first paragraph seems to contradict the rest of your story.

That's intentional. Most of it is junk, except these specific items.

Re: How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world

#229

Post by dmeola »

pathikrit wrote: post #221
bane wrote: post #150

I don't buy much IKEA furniture, very little of it survives even a single move, and for the price you can find plenty of furniture that does. So it ends up not being a great investment, except for a few very specific, highly optimized pieces. I have 6 Billys and my parents have something like 10. When I worked at a small startup and needed to fit out some field offices, I bought two things from the store, a Galant de…

Honest question: If I want the diversity of a Ikea catalogue with higher price and quality, where should I go?

Try Crate and Barrel, I've always felt it is just Ikea at a higher price + quality. I suspect the price increase is greater than the increase in quality though.

Re: How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world

#230

Post by freehunter »

aedron wrote: post #174
hueving wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I lament after switching to ebooks is the lack of books. Sounds silly, but I think a wall with shelves of books was quite nice looking and colorful.

I am happy to not have to store books in physical form. They are heavy, take up loads and loads of space, and do not keep well. And that's not even getting into how impractical they are to actually read (or search) compared with e-books. And still, something is missing in the home. A book collection might be the most personal touch a person can have in the home. Some of it is vanity, you want to show people what you…

My wife is an avid book collector, we we are both avid nomads. In the four years we've been together, we've lived in six places. Most of her books have not survived the repeated moves, with boxing, unboxing, storing, trips in trucks or trailers, etc. She's lost a lot of her physical books, most of which were paperbacks.

We've since condensed to only keeping hardcovers. Anything we would have bought as a paperback is now an ebook or is donated when we're done reading it. Our bookshelves only contain hardcovers, which looks a lot nicer and travels better too.

Post reply on HN