The news that Sony are to discontinue production of cassette Walkmen has provoked a few thoughts. The first, like for many others, was “you mean Sony have still been producing cassette Walkmen?”. I guess this is what Chris Anderson would describe as the long tail of the product lifecycle.
However, the thing that I found much more interesting was that between 1979 and 2010, Sony manufactured 202 million of the tape devices. Compare that to the first 9 years of the iPod, during which Apple have sold 270 million of the digital players.
Now it's probably fair to assume that Apple have a bigger share of the digital music player market than Sony ever did of the cassette market, and that the new market is now very much in decline as the portable music market migrates to phones. However, that's a shedload of product dumped into a market in comparison to what went before.
It's a dilemma. Whilst selling new things that we don't really need is what marks our civilised society from those that came before, and once basic needs are catered for what else is there to keep an economy going other than inventing even newer things that we don't really need? However, whilst the inequalities that exist across the globe still do, it feels somewhat profligate to say the least.
I suppose one saving grace these days is the extent to which more and more consumer devices are able to update themselves at a software level. Phones, cars, my new TV; I am sure that there are probably even irons and washing machines out there that come with the option for a firmware upgrade (well, maybe not irons…). This does give the potential for extending the use of devices for some time after their original purchase.
In the Android OS world, though, something weird is happening. Although the operating system is Open Source, most manufacturers seem to be building on top of it so as to add functionality that sets their products out from the competition. Operators then also mod these mods, and the net result is slow and cumbersome upgrade process that seems to lead to hardware obsolescence anyway (the upgrade happens so far after the OS version is available that you might as well just get a new contract and a new phone). But then I guess that the hardware manufacturers (and the operators, who use new handsets to lure new customers) don't really want a device to be too useful for too long…
mmitII 