> Ryobi handles DIY at Home Depot. Milwaukee handles pros. The two brands don't eat each other. They serve different people at different price points with different expectations
So market fit is driving both worse and better products at the same time. Cheap DIYers like me are buying the cheapest stuff we can find, and complaining that it's as cheap as its price. My neighbor the contractor buys the expensive stuff and finds that the quality at least somewhat reflects that.
Worse on purpose is my fault, because I'm the guy who bought a cheap Ryobi saw, instead of none at all. Plane flights are worse because I'm the guy who buys the cheapest ticket and tolerates the resulting discomforts. You can see that through the lens of greed and exploitation, or as just a market evolving to supply consumer demand.
The big thing that happened to power tools was Lithium-Ion batteries. All of these companies competed when they were still corded electric tools. You could just make a really good drill or saw or router.
Interchangeable batteries got really good and made every set of tools a platform. More importantly, there are only a handful of sources to get batteries from. For all these companies to differentiate and compete they needed to insert their products into wide lines of platforms.
FWIW these worseonpurpose articles have been popping up regularly, consistently accused of being slop, and the purported author has been called out as a Palantir AI shill. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779481
I recently decided I will go for the cheap Chinese store brand power tools for most things. It's about 1/5 to 1/3 the price of Ryobi, gets really good reviews, have been sold for more than 10 years now with the same batteries, and comes with a 5 year warranty which is 2 years more than ryobi. It's maybe not going to last 10 years, but at 1/5 the price it does not have to.
I don’t know if it’s by LLM generation or just contemporary style, but I find the style of omitting the subject from sentence after sentence after sentence unreadable. Once is fine. Six in a row is insufferable.
Same with all consumer white goods electronics: microwave ovens, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, etc. most white label by a few conglomerates with the same Chinese factories.
The "high quality ones" that have their own R&D and manufacturing, are very expensive and out of reach for a lot of people.
seems like a good business model to watch where PE is moving in. Start investing in quality designs while PE drives quality down, then sweep in and be the "quality amongst trash" brand.
I feel the same, but I do wonder sometimes if that’s true. Are there PE firms out there quietly operating great businesses that they’ve acquired? If not, why not? Surely in the long run that’s a better ROI, and private capital should be able to take a longer view, right?
So market fit is driving both worse and better products at the same time. Cheap DIYers like me are buying the cheapest stuff we can find, and complaining that it's as cheap as its price. My neighbor the contractor buys the expensive stuff and finds that the quality at least somewhat reflects that.
Worse on purpose is my fault, because I'm the guy who bought a cheap Ryobi saw, instead of none at all. Plane flights are worse because I'm the guy who buys the cheapest ticket and tolerates the resulting discomforts. You can see that through the lens of greed and exploitation, or as just a market evolving to supply consumer demand.
What if I'm a professional who needs to use Milwuake/American Airlines if I plan to get my work done?
These feel like choices in the same way you can choose to pay your extortion fee to the mob or choose to pay your taxes.
Interchangeable batteries got really good and made every set of tools a platform. More importantly, there are only a handful of sources to get batteries from. For all these companies to differentiate and compete they needed to insert their products into wide lines of platforms.
> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Shout out to TTI for keeping Ryobi cheap, cheerful, and a good value. Not my cup of tea, but their stuff is reasonably fine for the price.
> This isn't a tools story.
> The names change. The industries change. The strategy doesn’t.
The pattern
This isn't an insightful blog.
The names change. The topics change. The slop doesn’t.
Buy cheap and if you use it enough that it breaks, buy expensive the second time.
The "high quality ones" that have their own R&D and manufacturing, are very expensive and out of reach for a lot of people.
They mentioned Eye Wear is next, I think the author can guess where that is going. No reason to doubt the same will happen to that industry too.
So when your reputation is big you can slack on the product. Or is that naive? Is it the natural progression for all products?
Like in that movie Brasil. The food is awful but the illustration of the food is wonderful.