At 16:24 28/10/2010 -0300, Mike wrote:
Keith wrote:
> Find me a new consumer product that's highly desirable by the rich,
> very expensive -- say, equivalent to what the car was in the
> 1910s/20s -- but capable of repeated phases of mass production until
> it reaches down to everybody in due course.
I'm not sure you thought here is the right one, Keith.
In Made in America [1], the authors point out (1989) that US
manufacturers have done as you describe, introducing a New Thing that
only the rich (or industrial users) can afford. All-cast-iron, gold
plated with hand-fitted parts, so to speak. Once the carriage trade
market is saturated, they introduce the Elite model, then the Pop
model, then the Consumer model followed eventually by the Commodity
model for the lowest consumer base.
But way back at the intro of VCRs, the Japanese used a different biz
model. Engineer for production. Make a consumer model and flood the
world with it. Because they have a million units in use (rather than a
few thousand) they get statistical quality control, feedback on where
the design or engineering failed. They fix that for the next run. At
the end of a year or a few years, the US producer is just getting
tooled up for production engineering for the mass-production version.
But the Japanese already have the expertise, the technology, the
machinery and the data on what does and does not work in a consumer
product. They own the market and can recover any losses sustained
back when their first mass release had, perhaps, a large number of
returns, call-backs, plant design failures or whatever.
The Japanese could flood the market with VCRs ab initio because it was an
embellishment of what had already been a mass success.
Ocean-going yachts, or personal helicopters or family airplanes are the
nearest examples I can think of that are equivalent what the car was at
around 1900/20s. Mass production in due course could make them all
affordable. But here we run into limitation problems that Fred Hirsch
pointed out -- in this case spatial. They can never be more than elite
consumer products.
The only consumer product -- in this case a service -- I can think of that
satisfies the 'icon' criteria is DNA sequencing. The first one cost $10
billion but, since the Human Genome project of 2003 is already down to
about $10,000. In 10 years' time anybody will probably be able to obtain a
full read-out of their own genome on a chip from a slot machine and
costing, say $10. Along with it, a purchaser might even be given a
diagnosis of, say, the 'top ten' of particularly nasty gene variations that
might give a propensity to disease later in life or the risk of having
handicapped children. (Actually what I think will happen in this case is
that young people, particularly females who want to marry and have
children, will be able to 'grade' one another in a much more sophisticated
way than they do already. Employers will want to see the DNAs of job
applicants. Insurance companies will certainly want to see them [if they
want to remain in business!]. DNA read-outs will enhance the normal ways in
which we already differentiate our status levels.)
Keith
So maybe we won't ever see any new FatCat models of anything anymore.
Thirty years on, Apples seems to have adopted the Japanese model,
releasing the iPhone, not for the rich but for the merely reasonably
well-off, in vast quantities.
- Mike
[1] Made in America: the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity,
Michael Dertouzos, Richard Lester, Robert Solow, et al., MIT
Press, 1989
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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