As you know, the business is cyclic with styles. It's no different from clothing styles.
Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence...we make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then the next year we deliberately introduce something that will make these products old-fashioned, out of date, obsolete.
When it comes to consumer electronics, I'm a big fat sucker, because even though I know you should never, ever buy anything until the second version of it is released, I just can't resist. I live in a state of perpetual Beta.
I already am a product.
We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.
What we did ten years ago with the Playstation was a phenomenal success story for the company. That product had a ten year life cycle, which has never been done in this industry.
Recycling is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they are designed for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even "upcycled" - a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality.
One thing you know, if you've been in technology a while, you're only as good as the last thing you did. No one wants an original iPod. No one wants an iPhone 3GS.
A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
Philips is committed to the circular economy and is applying its principles throughout the organization. We are redesigning our products and looking at ways to capture their residual value.
No amount of artificial protection can permanently maintain an obsolete product, an inferior process or a moribund organization against competitors which are based on scientifically improved products or methods.
If something goes wrong with my switch, there's no way anyone from Bharti can do anything about it. An Ericsson guy is going to have to come and fix it. I don't manufacture it; I can't maintain or upgrade it. So I'm thinking, 'This doesn't really belong to me. Let's just throw it out.'
The DS was launched back in 2004, and sales of that machine hit a record in 2009 in the United States. That is totally different from the conventional sales pattern, in which game gear sales peak in the third year and take a downturn thereafter.
I am responsible for creating and overseeing the future products that make up Google Advertising.
I imagine a future with no waste; material innovations have already become exponentially more vast, and I do think the future needs to be cradle to cradle. If designed properly, one product could be used for many years before needing to be recycled, or its components reused.
It's better to get out before you reach the sell-by date.
If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.
It used to be that people needed products to survive. Now products need people to survive.
Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.
When I was growing up there was a product made by Sony called the Sony Walkman - a rage, everyone had to have one. Well, you don't hear about the Walkman anymore.
I like to tell people that all of our products and business will go through three phases. There's vision, patience, and execution.
I think an engineer has not matured until he or she has conceived of a product and participated in every stage of bringing it to fruition, if that makes sense. And not many engineers get to do all of those stages.
How many shots does it take before the concept ay choice becomes obsolete?
The merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution means new products are being phased in and out so fast that companies cannot afford to wait until the end of the year to figure out whether a team leader is doing a good job.
In a sense, there is no such thing as a bargain in computing. Models which are popular sell for the price they are supposed to fetch for the best part of their product cycle.
