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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

> Doing the same with LED lighting is pure corporate greed.

How does it help the corporation make more money?

by forcing customers to buy new ones more often?

That only works if there's something like brand loyalty or similar mechanism to make customers come back to the same manufacturer.

If my gadget just failed long before I was promised, I am quite likely to shop around.

No, it also works when non-optimal designs are very common in the market. (Not helped with the fact that especially in electronics many brands have decreased in (perceived) quality, so even if something performed well people don't necessarily trust that newer versions are too, which makes actually good brands also less sticky)

I don't understand.

Bad brands aren't sticky in this situation, are there. (I don't know whether good brands are sticky here.) So there's no extra incentives for planned obsolescence, because the next purchase is more than likely to go to a competitor.

Or what do you mean?

They’re saying all brands use planned obsolescence to force consumers to buy lightbulbs (from any brand) more often, increasing sales for the whole industry, not one specific brand.

This is how the Phoebus Cartel worked for incandescent bulbs. Every brand was in on it, it wasn’t about improving market share for specific brands.

That requires a lot of coordination. Any single company could break ranks?

There's a mechanism: if people want their bulbs to match, they might pick the same brand/model as a replacement

Wouldn't this sort of be a prisoner's dilemma sort of situation? The cartel hinges on every producer being complicit, if they are they get all long term small advantage, if they aren't, they and they alone get a huge short term advantage to the detriment of everyone else.

If a single one of them doesn't play ball and start selling "forever lamps" that last a hundred years (slap some patents on running LEDs at their rating, why not), they'll effectively salt the earth for the entire market.

And new competitors can enter the market, and existing producers know that.

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