At what point does a product last "too long"? It seems that designing an expensive lamp and marketing the fact that it lasts 37 years seems kinda...dumb. First there is the issue at the business level. Returning customers are the easiest and cheapest sells...but if your customer only buys a product every 30+ years...not great for business. Then there is the technology. Why make something last that long with current t…
This exact line of thinking has created scads of products that suffer from the opposite problem -- products that are kind of cheap and need to be repurchased every couple years, overall costing several times more than a good product would and generating several times more garbage.
> At what point does a product last "too long"? It seems that designing an expensive lamp and marketing the fact that it lasts 37 years seems kinda...dumb.
Well it is somewhat dumb because nobody believes it will last 37 years, partly because of the "everything is junk these days" effect that we've come to expect, but also because it comes with a two year warranty.