#obsolesence

Do you ever get the feeling you've been duped....

I learned a new phrase recently. Planned Obsolescence. And whilst I don’t usually fall for conspiracy theories this is one I can well and truly believe.

It was coined in the 1920s but it wasn’t really public knowledge until the mid 1950s. It was born out of a need to convince the American car buying public that they had to buy a new car before the old one was ready for the scrap yard. Because…

[Sent to [email protected] today, after yet another feature stopped working in my web browser.]

Now, because you’re a nerd and a techie, the first thing to come to your mind, a kind of automatic response, is going to be “Get a new machine, grandad” or something similarly contemptuous of those of us who dare to cruise the information superhighway in our old jalopies instead of something newer than than an unspeakably ancient five years old. I’m putting this paragraph here just to ask you not to stop thinking at that point, job done, move on to the next ticket.

Because it’s really irritating to get that response, time and again, whenever I mention the fact that I have a perfectly functional device that is barely five years old that developers have arbitrarily decided to stop supporting.

I can understand Apple dropping support for old OSs, because, after all, they want me to buy a new machine, and no whining on my part about recession and unemployment and wanting to continue to put food in my mouth and electricity through my lightbulbs will make a difference to their bottom line that if I fail to buy a new machine regularly then they have no use for me.

But tumblr, every time your developers “improve” a perfectly cromulent old feature such that it no longer works on my old iPad or ancient iMac, you’re that bit closer to losing me as a user. And if you don’t have me as a user, then what do you have to sell to your customers ― i.e. the companies you sell the user data to?

Do your board of directors know that your developers have this conditioned, lazy response to supporting users, to say to themselves that you don’t need me as a user if I can’t be bothered to keep up with the slightly sticky bit behind the bleeding edge of technology? Is it really part of tumblr’s business plan to throw potential sources of revenue away just because your developers can’t be bothered to keep features functional that worked fine for old users a year, six months, 48 hours ago?

Somehow, LiveJournal, Photobucket, flickr, WordPress, and a hundred other web services still manage to keep their developers from developing this compulsion to make things obsolete, to break things that work fine just because they’re older than a completely arbitrary date. If tumblr doesn’t need me, I guess I can do without tumblr. But I’d rather not; it does fill a niche in my ecology of web-use.

A light bulb built in 2012 will last for 1000 hours. A light bulb built in the 1890s has been on in a Livermore California Fire Station for over 970,000 hours (and is still going).

Here is a bit of its story as told by Dick Jones retired engineer and member of the Livermore Centennial Light Bulb Committee.

The Centennial Livermore Light Bulb was installed in 1901.  How long did it take before…