Back in the mid 90s my ex worked for a company named SAIC. She was a file clerk and dealt with microfiche. Her job was to access it to find information that was requested. When she found it she would print it out and send it to whoever had requested it. The department she worked in was responsible for inputting information onto a couple of mainframe computers. One was called a Vax and the other I can't remember its name. This was late 80s technology and before the internet had really taken off.
Different parts of that information was requested by what they called users and twice a month those parts of info would be printed out and sent to the appropriate users. We are talking millions of pages that needed to be printed and that part was handled by two industrial printers. This was back in the day of tractor feed printers and these printers ran 24seven for most of the month printing miles of paper. The cost of running the equipment along with inputting, collating, printing and shipping all the reports was astronomical.
My ex had given me a pretty good rundown on how everything was done from start to finish. During all this I had my own appliance repair business and purchased a custom built AT Pentium 2 home computer with a scanner and tractor feed printer. It wasn't quite state of the art but was pretty close. At the time I didn't know how to use a computer but eventually learned how to on it. Later on I saw a builtin CD writer on sale for home computers. It cost $750,00 and you had to use CD caddies along with your CDR media, but I figured I could use it to save my scanned material and such and archive them, so I bought one. It worked well for that but I then had the idea that if it worked for my limited uses why couldn't it work for SAIC?
Why should they have to spend millions printing and mailing tons of paper when they could write all that information on a little disc that would only cost pennies to send compared to what it cost to do it the way they had been doing it?
So here I had an idea that could save SAIC millions of dollars so I gave it to my ex and asked her to present it to the higher ups in the company. She poo pooed the idea. But I persisted and she relented. They recognized the value in my idea and because of that she was promoted from file clerk and was given a fat raise and put in charge of implementing my idea. She never mentioned that it was her husband's idea and I never asked her to. It did take a few years to fully put it into practice. I'm just guesstimating but I believe it saved them at least 100 million dollars. I say that because after the first year my ex said that it had saved the company 10 million dollars and the conversion to CDs was only 5% implemented. That first year was when all the cost of the implementation of it had been put into place so after that it was mostly where all the money was saved which leads me to believe it was at least a 100 million in savings. Boy would I love to have gotten a piece of that pie and rightly so.
There was also likely a lot of spinoff money generated through outside companies that were also needed to be hired to write the software. It's possible my idea spurred on the making of billions of dollars from spinoff businesses because the software that was written could be used across the board for that and many other businesses that wanted to use Cd Rs and CD rewritables in their business. It wasn't just the software that was needed. Another problem was compatibility between CD writers and readers. Some readers wouldn't read material that was written by certain writers and vice versa. Basically what likely I spurred on was an industry of software writers and hardware manufacturing of cross compatible devices.
I remember going to a computer, software and hardware show in Las Vegas about 5 years later that was full of spinoffs to the idea that I started through my ex wife and SAIC. Don't get me wrong. I don't claim to be a genius, but what I am gifted at is coming up with real practical ideas that solve or make things a lot easier and cheaper to do. Most of my ideas were just used for my own projects and that of close friends so this one was the only big one. My idea was simple and I can't fathom why the people at SAIC didn't think of it before me. These were people that were directly working in the technology field and manufactured hi tech weapons for the military among other things.
The idea to write data to CD roms had been out for a years. While writing data to them was cheap and easy there were limitations to how you could access the data and took people who were above my pay grade to bring it to fruition, but my little idea was all it took and at the very least saved SAIC millions. Did I spur on all the other technological innovations that proceeded? I don't know for sure. It's kind of nice to think I did but sad at the same time that I didn't really benefit from it. My ex did because SAIC kept her trained and up to date with all the technology that came down the road. She's now paid around $150,000 a year which puts her in the top 10% of wage earners because of my idea. Now all the information that used to be written on CD is kept on servers and can be accessed through the web and her job is to keep the servers of whatever company she works for running.
She conveniently denies the idea to set up a CD writing scheme for her employer had anything to do with me, but that's a typical woman. Anyway I wish at the time there was a way for me to have benefited from my idea other than my wife pretty much being the only one that did. But at the time I figured I would be married until we grew old and died of old age. But stupidity and selfishness on her part changed all that. She was born again Christian, but even that doesn't stop a woman from ignoring God's word and doing what the world tells them to do. Anyway I've been left for the first 8 years since the divorce living at poverty level and the last 2 living with cancer and at less than the poverty level. Well as they say no good deed goes unpunished.
One of my give away ideas that I don't care about was at Office Max. A store employee asked if he could help me. I said, "Yes, Can you place all these rebates on one form." He submitted the idea to the corporate headquarters. They liked the idea and implemented and he got a bonus. He thanked me the next time he saw me in the store. Now Menards has all their rebates on one form.
There are ideas I giveaway for free and ideas I don't want to give away for free. But I have made people rich.
The rebate form is a great example of a simple idea that made things easier. That's just one of millions of little things that could be done that are not done. I'm sure there are many smart people like you and I that have tried to fix some of the things that should be fixed but didn't.
Why aren't they fixed? It's likely because for every smart one out there trying to fix things. There are some dumb, short sighted, hardheaded, lazy person or people keeping it from being done.
FIX? That is less profitable. Greater profits are building things to be replaced. You don't want something that never needs to be fixed and never needs to be replaced. That would be unprofitable. For continued business, it is good to sell things that need to be replaced. That keeps industry going. It is highly profitable to sell the inferior. Great profit margins in selling the inferior. It undermines the superior. Did you ever watch the film, "Brilliant Minds"? Now it is built-in obsolescence. No one wants us to have quality anymore. Junk sells. Asphalt shingles are junk. They know its junk. Many products are like asphalt shingles. The industry is built upon them. Keep people paying.
I never watched "Brilliant Minds". But I'm very familiar with planned obsolescence. I watched it come into play over the years and had to deal with it in my appliance repair business. Due to my health problems I had to step away from it and when I was forced to return to it or starve, the first thing I had to get used to was the current crop of appliances that were made to fail and often times were not repairable without spending more on them then the cost of a new one.
Cars and trucks have obviously suffered the same fate. Ironically American cars/trucks became terrible for a time but due to Japanese influence and market forces improved but have since gone down again.
The pandemic has caused a major uptick in the planned obsolescence with the availability of certain spare parts not being manufactured and no real effort being made to start it up again. So now many late model vehicles are sent to junk yards due to lack of spare parts.
China has been making it difficult to get quality spare parts by counterfeiting them even when the OEM ones are available. China should have never been allowed to steal so much from us but here we are. I think that if that hadn't been allowed to happen then planned obsolescence wouldn't be at the level it's at. I also think the trade imbalance also played a major role. Both forced the US manufacturers to compete with lower wage and lower prices of third world countries which drove down quality in order to compete.
