> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
Some counterpoints:
- Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best copier possible".
- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".
- Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development history to prioritize domination over "best OS possible", sometimes actively degrading the good features and parts of its OS.
- Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".
- Many more electronic and electromechanical systems are engineered with short lives to prioritize "minimizing costs and maximizing profit" over "building the best X possible".
- Lastly, Boeing's doing all kinds of shady stuff (MCAS, doors, build quality, etc.) since they prioritize "maximize shareholder value" over "building the best planes possible".
- ...and there's Intel, but I think the idea is clear here.
The thing is, nothing is completely maintenance free, esp. if there's something mechanical. Make wearing parts wear, core parts robust. All my laser printers were Samsung/Xerox (hah), and their "core" is made like a tank. Only its rollers, toner and imaging/drum kits wear down, and these are already consumables.
The device keeps track the life of every of these replaceable components, and you replace them you hit these marks, because they're already worn down to hinder reliable operation (Imager dies at 9K pages, rollers at 20K pages IIRC).
You don't need to make things fail prematurely to make something profitable. First one of these printers didn't have replaceable rollers, so I had to donate it after 11 years of operation. This one is almost 8 years old IIRC, and it's still going strong. I'll be using it as long as I can find spares for it, because it's engineered "correctly", not "for profit". Meantime, its manufacturer can still profit from parts, toner and imaging units.
The example I always go to is U-Haul in the US. They have a functional monopoly on quickly getting a pickup truck or small box car. I used to tell people there was no need to own a pickup truck because I could go grab one for $30 once or twice a month when I needed it.
After a year of shitty apps, constantly being sold things I didn't need because they try to secretly upsell you 50 times during checkout. Having to go into the store to get the keys and wait in line for 1 hour behind people screaming about how they were cheated... I bought a truck.
U-Hual still has their monopoly, but they lost my business, not because I went to a competitor, but because I altered my life to no longer need their business.
Maybe instead of buying eink tablets, I would have kept printing things had printers been better products.
Only problem is that everyone else also has figured that out so hard to secure one.