Reply to post: Re: 3 years is "up to a decade"

Re: 3 years is "up to a decade"

Indeed, as someone embroiled in asset lifecycle management, up-to-a-decade quite clearly means I can buy it and have it last less than 60 seconds before needing a fix. Cue, unreliable, but fixable parts, spare part sales, and high callout fees to fix stuff.

How about moving it to 2 standard deviations worth of the asset population being expected to serve 10 years without intervention; and for those components that have potential to fail out to year 10, ensuring they are both replaceable and stock not exorbitantly priced. Replaceability is useless if it's cheaper to throw away and get a new one (Which it probably is for you average consumable white good - think fixing a £100 TV - probably not cost effective).

A really crazy, recent example - bought a Samsung telly about 2yrs ago. Not long after buying it, on unplugging a HDMI lead from the breakout box; one of the sacrificial fuses on the PCB triggered when the cable arced. 1) it shouldn't have arced and 2) rather than just replacing the breakout box; they replaced the entire TV. How wasteful!

I do think there's something of an irony here; Cars have spent a hundred years getting exceptionally good at being maintainable (and their failure modes being well understood); to the point now that spares availability is the main blocker to keeping it in circulation. My last Subaru, 15yrs old - still excellent, but spare parts availability dried up around year 12 or so. Minor issues therefore become unresolvable. I know they are a comparatively "small" volume UK seller; but it just stopped being cost-sensible to hang onto it.

White goods, and anything other than modular computers, the complete reverse. Remember the IBM DeathStar hard disks that failed on cue to the day the limited warranty ran out? Or the capacitor plague - particularly the awful support by Apple of the G5. Technically, a "fixable" machine, but can you get the parts; can you heck. Even 10 years ago, spares meant taking good parts from other failing systems.