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Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

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Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#111

Post by dragontamer »

jotm wrote: post #39
chrisweekly wrote: post #4

... or things that work at all? (eg humidifiers, at various price points, maybe 40% of which are even functional when first unboxed)

Boil water on a stove - boom, humidity increased!

Or just get a hot mist humidifier, which does this except:

1. Electronically (ex: you can do this in your bedroom directly, or anywhere you need the warm-mist)

2. With safety measures (its still dangerous, but they minimize the amount of boiling water to minimize the possible harm. Better than an entire pot of boiling water, but still half-a-cup of boiling water can severely burn you still)

3. Probably as cheap as the pot you were using to boil water anyway. Warm mist humidifiers are like $35.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#112

Post by everyone »

Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

Comments here are often more interesting than the linked articles. I think the 'comment on title' phenomenon is acceptable and possibly good here.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#113

Post by [deleted] »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #50

I tend to write stuff that works well. I'm working on the last two screens of a project that has been underway for a couple of years. It's still a ways off from release, as we have lots of fender-polishing to do, but I'm pretty chuffed with how it works. One of the reasons that it has taken this long, is because I am totally anal about Quality. Constant stopping to fix bugs, or even refactor out bad design decisions.…

[deleted]

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#114

Post by makeitdouble »

______-_-______ wrote: post #80
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #59

Looking through old Sears catalogs and seeing the prizes on older game shows, I think some of our memory is selective. Even in photos and SD video you can see the terrible build quality on many consumer products from those earlier times. This seems to be especially true for furniture and exercise equipment. When you convert into current dollars, this low quality junk often is more expensive than what is available tod…

In other words, 90% of everything is crap, both then and now. And thanks to Lindy's Law, you're usually better off buying something old than something new. But that's not how most people think :( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

In personal experience things were more crappy then than now. The explaining factor could be that production techniques have evolved as a whole, and less manual steps harmonizes the quality of cheap goods.

To take IKEA as an example, their table were really bad 20 years ago, and the only option was to either buy from another flatpack company, that was often worse (assembly would need like 50 screws for a single table...wtf), or a hand made "old fashion" table that would last a lifetime but cost 10 times more. Current IKEA tables will last a lifetime for the same price as the crap from 20 years ago.

Another example is French and Italian cars. They were really bad decades ago, reliability issues were only compensated by the ease to repair and cheap local maintenance. But industrial process are so much better now that production quality and reliability is at a level way above what would be expected for cars of roughly the same production cost.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#115

Post by Talinx »

One effect that might also be at play here is, assuming that excellence follows a Pareto distribution:

If your team is very good, i.e. on one end of the distribution, most products will be made by teams that are average, i.e. not that good. In that case it is easy to notice flaws.

If you are smart and knowledgeable enough so that you could design/create/implement the products you use easily, you will see room for improvements.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#116

Post by Strilanc »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #105
Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

The article is yet another one about supply and demand that ignores first day of microeconomics price theory: If supply is low, demand is high, the price goes up.

In what way is the article about that? How is Apple getting a better chip by learning to do it themselves, because cpu manufacturers are trapped by misaligned benchmarks, just a trivial statement about supply and demand?

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#117

Post by klodolph »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #105
Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

The article is yet another one about supply and demand that ignores first day of microeconomics price theory: If supply is low, demand is high, the price goes up.

And if the market is inefficient, the pricing will be irrational (for certain ideas of what “irrational” means).

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#118

Post by klodolph »

Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

> …he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating.

A.k.a. “avoiding weasel words”. I don’t mean to be clever here, it’s just that it’s far more efficient to assume that reader can make their own informed decision, and give them citations & instructions for reproducibility to help them along the way, rather than shovel a bunch of weasel words into the parts of your writing that are less grounded in reproducible facts.

There are also different expectations for blog posts and heavily researched&vetted articles.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#119

Post by analog31 »

yrral wrote: post #16

I think it's that you don't notice things that work well. House foundations, light switches, filesystems, silicon manufacturing, water delivery, grocery store logistics, etc etc etc. These are all things that most people never notice because they just work. It doesn't even occur to people day-to-day that these things can fail.

House foundations, light switches, and water delivery, along with the professions that install them, are all regulated and licensed. There is somewhat of a trend for the quality of those things to have regional variation, e.g., lower quality in places that have historically had weak code enforcement and weak unions. And yes, the regulation probably did make those things more expensive.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#120

Post by andrewingram »

Aeolun wrote: post #100
Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

> he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating At least the parts about build vs buy sound extremely familiar to me. Setting up and integrating something you’ve bought often takes as much or more time than building it yourself. The best argument for buying is that you’d make all stakeholders equally unhappy.

Reminds me of hiring an in-house team of Salesforce engineers to build out and maintain the hugely expensive CRM you bought because you… didn’t want to spend engineering time on a CRM.
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