My television broke down last week. But as I discovered, the drawback of owning just the one set is that there’s no backup when it breaks down. Given that TV repairmen went the way of the dodo long ago, I had no choice but to go out and buy a new one.
I wouldn’t mind, but I only had the set for two years: that makes it younger than my desktop PC. Fellow IT Week columnist Kelvyn Taylor tells me this is quite the norm now. Whereas we once kept our TVs for generations and changed our computers every 18 months, today we change our TVs on a whim and try and keep the PCs going for longer and longer.
I was quite shocked when I arrived at Curry’s to find that my only choices were LCD or plasma. You can’t buy a CRT television any more, except for portable models and returned stock. While I think LCD and plasma are terrific, they are incredibly expensive, while even widescreen CRT sets were quite cheap.
This scenario of product churn is a regrettably common one for IT buyers, too. What makes it so frustrating in the IT sector at the moment is that the latest products don’t necessarily run much faster or offer more functionality. Instead, the major trend is towards miniaturisation, so much so that functionality sometimes gets sacrificed in the process. The average LCD TV or monitor has pathetic, tinny little speakers, for example.
Now take Samsung’s 32GB solid state drive for notebooks. It’s wonderfully tiny and virtually indestructible but it costs more than £10 per gigabyte, compared with around 65p per gigabyte for a regular notebook disk drive. Or consider VIA’s insanely small Pico motherboards: just 10cm long and running on 13 watts but restricted to VIA’s own C7 processors. Or Palm’s Foleo, the mobile phone companion launched recently to near-universal derision in the press.
OK, if you don’t want or need these products, then don’t buy them. The difficulty arises when you no longer have a choice and the expensive new t echnologies have replaced the previous ones entirely, just as they were getting to commodity price level.
It’s not a childish argument about size. I understand why small products cost a lot. I also appreciate why manufacturers stop making products that have become so cheap and the market so saturated that there is only a little profit in continuing them.
What I don’t like is knowing that the current crop of brilliant new products will, in their turn, be whipped away from under our noses just at the point at which we can afford them, only to be replaced by something even more clever but costing over 10 times as much. I can see a time when my £20 DVD player will break down and I’ll only be able to replace it with a £400 Blu-ray alternative, for example.
So what happened to customer choice?
