Improve it till it sucks, why it happens - part one

A long time ago in a career far-far away, I was once asked this question by my electronics store sales manager... He first told me, "Look around. Look at all the items in this store. Why are these particular items here?" I looked at the various items in the store. There were quite a variety with each having some utility but with almost no common use that I could see.

So, wondering where he was going with that question, I told him I had no idea. His reply was loud but direct, "THEY ARE HERE TO BE SOLD!". It was at that point when I finally truly understood the reasoning behind the apparent stupidity of some products. It now made sense why some of the higher priced radios sounded the same as the lower priced units with the only difference being that the higher priced unit had more functionally useless plastic parts stuck on them. It was the same reason some radios had excessive glowing lights, and LCD displays which looked high-tech but added virtually nothing to the music but were fetching higher prices than neighboring items on the shelf. I realized that the product designers simply wanted to maximize money. If it caused radios to become more ornate to sell better, so be it.

To multinational corporations, products are only useful as devices for which money is gathered. They have little sense of trying to make the world a better place. Rather, they are ultimately governed by stockholders and the legal requirement to make as high of a return for capital invested as possible. They care not if they sell round radios, yellow airplanes or square apples. As long as the items make money they are considered a success! In extreme cases, if an item is useful, it's almost a side effect. In many cases, the requirement of being useful isn't needed at all. Witness a fad from the 1970s called the pet rock.


The next piece of the puzzle, which I have never seen mentioned in any textbook, is another reason why so much stuff tends to improve till it sucks. When taken with this posting, it explains much.
See  part two.