[TheForge] Disgusting Ironwork

[Andy Vida]

Peter Fels And Phoebe Palmer wrote:

> but ..well does that suggest that one put up a piece of work along with
> an expose' of shoddy wrought?

	That is a choice we all have to make for ourselves.  I would
	not, as I know many others wouldn't.  But some would and I
	accept it, but I don't have to agree with it.

> Shoddy rot[sic] rots quickly enough, but that's less than an education.

	This somewhat comes back to expectations, which have been
	drastically and radically altered in the past couple of 
	decades.  Remember when a telephone could double as a deadly
	weapon, or an anchor for an aircraft carrier?  When I began
	working fot AT&T shortly after the divestiture, they started
	producing really lousy phones.  I asked one of the old timers
	what was up with that.  He told me that AT&T had spent millions
	of dollars on a marketing study to determine customer 
	expectations on phone quality.  Apparently they found that most
	customers expected their phones to break at about two years and
	need replacement.  With this information they engineered their
	phones to last almost precisely that long and justified it as
	"meeting customer expectations".

	Had this been the attitude of men such as Andrew Carnegie, the
	USA would never have amounted to anytihng better than a two-bit,
	third rate, backwater republic.  But AT&T thought that this
	strategy would serve them well, and it did for awhile, but now
	look at where they are.  What was once by far the largest
	corporate entity on the planet is now an nth-rate has-been,
	rotting on the barren desert floor with the vultures circling,
	and waiting ever so patiently overhead.  Stupidity costs.