Planned obsolescence, and the idea that it is strategical to design something like a car to wear out in a few years is popularly believed to be clever and widely practiced.
However, harming your brand is far more damaging than a short term gain. New customers are far more expensive than repeat customers, and a previously angered customer is even more expensive. In the long term, value as perceived by customers gives companies more pricing freedom, and as long as there are competitors that do not collude, attempts to create scarcity ultimately will be counter productive.
>Planned obsolescence, and the idea that it is strategical to design something like a car to wear out in a few years is popularly believed to be clever and widely practiced.
"Planned obsolescence" is a grossly misunderstood and misused term. It's not a nefarious scheme to get you to buy more stuff. The term has meant a few different things over the years, but that isn't one of them.
It's a popular mis-use of the term to mean they're designing your car to break down so you have to buy a new one. Companies are smart enough to know the value of reputation.
The popular misconception is relevant to its efficacy, but I think the operational meaning of the term is generally well understood. There is a linguistics discussion to be had about prescriptivism and descriptivism as to whether it refers only to iterative increases in quality, or also intentional reliability.
To see the historical use of the term, I encourage you to glance at some of the literature[1] — especially in auto industry contexts.
Sure, but to http://books.google.com, though the front of the link doesn't make it obvious. You can alter it to focus on a specific time frame if you choose, or add a term about automobiles.
As you pointed out, the concept of intentional unreliability over time is like an anti-pattern for business, yet it is one encompassed by the term "planned obsolescence".
I'm sorry, but there are plenty of companies that have made great businesses out of producing less-reliable products.
If I buy a thing - almost any thing - from Walmart, I know that quality of that thing is not the first priority. A hammer from Walmart - theoretically a kind of good that can last forever - is going to be made from worse steel, the grip is going to fall off with heavy use, the wooden handle will splinter, it's going to rust. It will not last as long as a hammer purchased from Home Depot. On the other hand, it will be cheaper. Walmart is making a perfectly good business off of selling such goods.
Walmart chooses to stock lesser quality goods. We accept that as a legitimate business model. But Walmart doesn't come to my house and worsen the goods later on - they don't come and spray the hammer with salt-water to encourage me to get a new one. Digital goods don't fall apart on their own, so companies like EA which want to sell inferior goods have to take affirmative action to make them fall apart ("hey, let's link all our goods to a server, and turn the server off a few months after the good comes out"), and this doesn't sit well with us in our perceptions.
Only if you're misusing the term. As popularized by Stevens in 1954 it just means the car companies are going to use styling to get you to buy a new car before the old one wears out.
However, harming your brand is far more damaging than a short term gain. New customers are far more expensive than repeat customers, and a previously angered customer is even more expensive. In the long term, value as perceived by customers gives companies more pricing freedom, and as long as there are competitors that do not collude, attempts to create scarcity ultimately will be counter productive.