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Let's make quality the norm again

forbrukerradet.no

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Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#501

Post by dghlsakjg »

Xirdus wrote: post #495
dghlsakjg wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you live and what is "not cheap" to you? In the US there is Flexsteel, Stickley, Herman Miller, Hooker, Bradington Young and many more. Even La-z-boy makes decent quality. Expect a lower end sofa from these companies to be $3,000 on sale, and a really nice one to be $10k+. Quality furniture is typically made to order since people paying that much are going to want to choose a finish and fabrics. I don't know…

> Quality furniture is typically made to order Exactly!!! It used to NOT be like that!!!

Not in my memory has that changed, but many of these brands offer off the shelf stuff as well, its just that if you are spending that much money most customers would rather pick a fabric than have it picked for them. If anything, there is more off the shelf stuff than before with the advent of flat pack logistics and hyperscaled retail.

I think that what IS true is that there is a lot more to choose from on the low end. There are effectively infinite low end options via china/amazon, but if you want high quality stuff you have to seek it out.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#502

Post by zelphirkalt »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #306
tene80i wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're experiencing market segmentation. You won't pay $8.99 a month, so you don't get an ad-free product like the people who will pay. The service would rather get less than $8.99 from you than nothing, so you get ads.

But the part they seem to miss (or I get lost in the statistics) is that I wont use the service if I get annoyed by the ads. So they turn me into a churn which I wouldnt have been.

That's the delusional part. They think, that their service is so great, that obviously you don't have any choice but to use it anyway.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#503

Post by nrr »

WalterBright wrote: post #499
Xirdus wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But was Mercedes always inferior to Ford or were only some particular models of Mercedes inferior to Ford? If it's the former than my point still stands.

4 of them owned by members of my family over 4 decades is good enough for me. Mercedes cars a patchwork of overengineering and underengineering. Overengineering like sodium cooled valves, but a fatal susceptibility to overheating. Like a driveline that is not aligned properly with the engine. And electric windows that are so poorly made they keep the mechanism in stock. Fords, on the other hand, have an even, predict…

> Fords, on the other hand, have an even, predictable quality. The same with my 72 Dodge. The windows still crank up and down nicely!

I don't know if I'd say they have an even, predictable quality, but on an actuarial basis, Detroit certainly makes for easier claim severity modeling than anything out of Ingolstadt, Muenchen, Stuttgart, or Wolfsburg.

That said, I don't really understand how quality maps to cars beyond what my comprehension of Japanese has allowed me to read about how Toyota's industrial engineering contrasts against Ford's. My first may have been a 1971 Opel GT that I salvaged by bringing home in parts on a bicycle-drawn trailer as a teenager, but I only ever wrenched on it. I never drove it.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#504

Post by marcus_holmes »

chronogamous wrote: post #458
marcus_holmes wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's part of the growth paradigm - that everything must continue to grow. Let's say your product is mature. Your market is pretty much saturated; everyone who wants to use this product is using either yours or a competitor's. You and your competitors are finely balanced, you could reduce your prices and get more market share, but that wouldn't increase your profits. You have optimised your manufacturing process to th…

How does cutting quality, shrinkflating and enshittifying fit in a paradigm where everything must continue to grow? It is willfully destroying the value of something you know to be valuable. By engaging in such practices you are as guilty as any competitors that are doing the same, and you're as criminally insane as any shareholder that would encourage what will inevitably be the downfall of the company. You're invol…

Because it's only profits that must grow every year. And if you can't increase prices, or market share, or the market size, then you must cut costs. And if the only way to cut costs is to destroy the product, then that's what must happen.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#505

Post by red369 »

mitxela wrote: post #425
red369 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why such a personal attack? I don't think I even know you! I'm kidding, but what you say is hitting pretty close to home. I always mean to vote with my wallet, and I usually try, but for every Mikrotik router or Framework laptop I buy, there are so many Aukey Magsafe chargers, or McDodo Lightning to USB hubs. BTW, I'm not specifically calling out Aukey or McDodo, but for me those decisions were based on moments of we…

For what it's worth, Apple chargers are, or used to be, pretty high quality. There's this infamous teardown video of a cheap clone showing 0.5mm of air is all that's between you and a potentially fatal electric shock.

I 100% agree regarding Apple charging adapters. It is mostly their cables I have a problem with, and even that seems mostly around strain relief. I don’t mind being careful with the stain on cables, but I don’t want to have to convince others. They also do make some that have a braided exterior which seem to last much better. In general, when I see people using cheap power adapters, I encourage them to use cheap cables if they have to, but at least the adapter should be from a company that would be embarrassed if it exploded or killed you. Usually people have enough adapters around from when they bought old phones. My mum has an odd habit of plugging in the phone and then turning on the power switch afterwards. A knock-off Apple charger she was using caught fire with a bang, and somehow threw the phone some distance. I’m not clear how that is possible. The fact she wasn’t holding the phone may have been very important.

Re: Let's make quality the norm again

#506

Post by emn13 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #133
austin-cheney wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When people put quality requirements too high on software, we get situations where This is a common trope of the unregulated: We can’t raise quality because we can barely deliver as it is . The real message there is that the user should suffer so that you won’t.

I'm a consumer of software, not a developer. And I can tell you that as a consumer I always prefer something over nothing. If you can do it better, you have a golden opportunity, which you should take, to deliver something better to the market. Otherwise, you haven't much reason to complain that other people are doing at least something .

The thing is, it's a false dichotomy. Raising the quality bar makes software a lot _easier_ to deliver, in practice. Even for a not techie, the reason is probably somewhat intuitive - if you're trying to add features to something that's a hugely complicated mess, you're going to struggle and cause many bugs; but if your process allows for the creation of high quality code, you have the means to do so with confidence, and that usually means quickly and reliably.

The real issue is one of timing and tech debt - higher quality software is cheaper and better, but... that's only over time. If you want that new software from scratch _now_, and don't have the time to set up a high quality development process, you can hack something together quickly. If the software is small enough, the person or LLM writing it smart enough, and while everything from requirements to code is still fresh in memory - that works pretty well! But that process scales poorly, and yet it's what we've as an industry done far too often, and at far too pervasive a scale.

So even though we know and have examples of how to design software better and more cheaply, actually getting to that situation isn't a simple question of trying harder; it's working entirely differently. And unfortunately, we build more and more of our software on the building blocks of the past, and many of those are themselves of low quality too; the more we do that, the more entrenched low quality becomes. As an end user that kind of isn't perceivable; it just means all software is a bit worse and more expensive, but as humanity, it's absurd how much effort we waste working around fairly trivial mistakes made in the past, typically by organizations that just had no incentives to care about future impacts especially on others.

While I get the instinct to prefer something over nothing as an end user it kind of is exactly that bad habit that got us into the mess we're in today. We don't build and throw away; we copy and tweak - so all the messes are inherited, kind of like a form of pollution.

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