The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

Maintainability and Reliability as Selling Points
Planned obsolescence, which includes a firm’s refusal to support its older 
products, is not a good way to ensure that customers will continue to buy 
the product. Smart customers will look for ways to avoid buying a product 
that is not reliable, or for which customer service is discontinued or oth-
erwise not available. Also remember that disgruntled customers can now 
give an unsatisfactory product a bad rating on various Internet sites where 
prospective customers will see it.
* * *
And here is another point. The service must be the best you can give. It is 
considered good manufacturing practice, and not bad ethics, occasionally 
to change designs so that old models will become obsolete and new ones will 

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134  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
have to be bought either because repair parts for the old cannot be had, or 
because the new model offers a new sales argument which can be used to 
persuade a consumer to scrap what he has and buy something new. We have 
been told that this is good business, that it is clever business, that the object 
of business ought to be to get people to buy frequently and that it is bad busi-
ness to try to make anything that will last forever, because when once a man 
is sold he will not buy again.
Our principle of business is precisely to the contrary. We cannot conceive 
how to serve the consumer unless we make for him something that, as far 
as we can provide, will last forever. We want to construct some kind of a 
machine that will last forever. It does not please us to have a buyer’s car wear 
out or become obsolete. We want the man who buys one of our products 
never to have to buy another. We never make an improvement that renders 
any previous model obsolete. The parts of a specific model are not only inter-
changeable with all other cars of that model, but they are interchangeable 
with similar parts on all the cars that we have turned out. You can take a car 
of ten years ago and, buying to-day’s parts, make it with very little expense 
into a car of to-day. Having these objectives the costs always come down 
under pressure. And since we have the firm policy of steady price reduction, 
there is always pressure. Sometimes it is just harder!