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Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

worseonpurpose.com

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Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#21

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #4

"Worse on purpose" is just "Minimum viable product"

Not quite. "Getting worse" is discussing a mechanism where a product first has a good reputation, for good reasons. It's not "minimum viable".

And then the company proceeds to exploit that reputation for all it's worth, by making the product cheaper to make, while keeping the sale price the same, knowing that it takes a long time for the reputation to catch up. But eventually it does and the brand is basically defunct. Used up and discarded, being drained of reputational value.

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#22

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #18
tweakimp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "minimum viable product" is part of the development process. If you are already at a certain quality and choose to make it worse, this is something else. Enshittification or just greed come to my mind.

The “minimum” means minimum price. There is a big market for the lowest price product in case a customer wants the lowest quality product because they only need to use it a couple times or for a trivial task. Buying a cheap tool at Harbor Freight first and then going for the more expensive tool is a good way to save money.

> The “minimum” means minimum price.

But "worse on purpose" products typically decrease the quality (and cost to make) without decreasing the sale price to match. It's exploiting the product's reputation for being premium not minimum.

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#23

Post by xnx »

This entire site can be boiled down to: products get decrease in quality when customers don't know or don't care what quality is.

Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default position of trying to get you to buy something.

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#25

Post by ndriscoll »

tweakimp wrote: post #15
Schlagbohrer wrote: post #4

"Worse on purpose" is just "Minimum viable product"

The "minimum viable product" is part of the development process. If you are already at a certain quality and choose to make it worse, this is something else. Enshittification or just greed come to my mind.

Clearly it's just the start and end state of product development: make an MVP—the very worst thing people will buy, start to gain market share while you improve, reach market saturation, merge with competition, "value engineer" back to MVP—the very worst thing people will still buy.

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#27

Post by eventualcomp »

xnx wrote: post #23

This entire site can be boiled down to: products get decrease in quality when customers don't know or don't care what quality is. Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default po…

The market for lemons is always bustling, I guess [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#28

Post by LtWorf »

bsenftner wrote: post #12
comrade1234 wrote: post #3

I read years ago about a drill which was sold at Walmart with the same sku as in higher-end stores but the Walmart version had plastic gears. This was due to pricing pressure by Walmart on the manufacturer. Me, personally, I seek out first Swiss brands then German brands when buying most things. I'm willing to pay extra. In fact I'm a little pissed off this week because I ordered some oxygen absorbers off a Swiss web…

I did a little research study back in 2003 where I went to various grocers and purchased the same product at these grocers and compared. Walmart has larger boxes, and less contents, universally, for pretty much everything in a box, and they charge 1/3 more for their 2/3rds of what you get everywhere else. They make nearly 50% more profit from that little slight of hand. And try discussing this with any shoppers and t…

I've met CS PhD students in AI (a field that almost exclusively uses python) be completely unable to start a python script on their machine.

Re: Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality

#30

Post by theturtletalks »

I call this the cycle of disruption.

A company makes a really good product as first challenging incumbents. They get so big, they eventually become the incumbent. All this time, they’re probably losing money on the product or breaking even. Eventually, investors will want returns on their investment. This will first happen with prices increases to save the quality of the product. Once they can’t raise prices anymore, the quality will be decreased. By this point, the brand is strong enough to get sales even on this worse product.

Then another company will come in and make the same product but better than the incumbent. The cycle continues.

My point is find these new companies that are trying to get market share by making a higher quality product. And if you really like that product, buy 2.

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