Quote:
Originally Posted by Solicitous
Not saying it is 100% fact but the movie The Lightbulb Conspiracy discusses planned obsolescence. Interesting, thought provoking.
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I guess, lightbulbs are one of the most critical examples.
About 25 years ago, as a student one of my friends was working as an intern for one of the 3 big corporates manufacturing lightbulbs.
He told us, those 3 have an agreement: If one has a bottleneck in his production, the other 2 jump in. Meaning: They all basically can manufacture the same product, it's just labeled differently.
In a stagnating market, from a manufacturer's perspective this probably makes sense: Why fight over some 5% market share and killing margins? Why not instead each stick to about 1/3 of the market and all keeping margins high?
And one only can speculate about the other agreements in place: Price, quality, durability, new technologies, energy consumption, .....
But I can't imagine such scenarios for many other market segments.
Do Samsung and HTC have such an agreement? I wouldn't expect so...
As long as each is on all other's throats, such agreements are impossible.
Even more so in highly dynamic markets...