[TheForge] Disgusting Ironwork

[Michael Horgan]

>         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".

   Yup,in my day job, working the lines at SBC Repair, I have to explain 
this to folks all the time. Pre divestiture, the Bell System owned all the 
phones. They leased them out and expected a good return. Design lifetime 
for the Western Electric sets was 75 years, and they were easily 
repairable. Sure, and you could drive nails with them ;^)
    Today's sets, from whichever manufacturer, have a two year design life, 
since they only make money when you buy another set. This is also why 
replacement battery packs for cordless sets cost almost as much as a new set.

    I usually direct them to a business chain store to buy a telephone set 
with only the features they must have, since a thousand dollar phone system 
has the same life expectancy as a $9.95 cheapy.



Michael D. Horgan , lughaid at earthlink.net
http://members.aol.com/lughaid/
posting from
  A BRAZEN FORGERY
Blacksmithing and Metalwork
Claremont, Ca.