It's all good so far

The “Next New” event is going on in Austin right now.  While the news and social media is full of stories from this event, I find myself reading a novel about futurists by an Austin Author.  So there is a lot of the next new thing floating around right now.  

The trouble is that after awhile, the next new thing becomes just that thing, and if wasn’t a really can’t live without it item, it just becomes unused stuff.

A friend and I were discussing this yesterday.  Although we are from the tail end of the baby boom, we were at the start of the digital revolution.  We have had time to accumulate stuff.  A closet/garage/basement with stacks of old audio, computer tech that is not used anymore. 

But it was stuff we could not live without. We have spent part of our lives working so that we could acquire that stuff.  Time that we wont get back.  That is the accepted trade off, your labor allowing you to buy goods.  Makes you wonder what is a durable good.  

What is our expectancy on the life cycle of these new necessities.

Our parents did not celebrate the next new big thing every six months, the product they could not live with out.  Think about how many times did our parents change out appliances versus how often our generation does.  They had a greater expectation of the product.  Things were built to last.  

Something is wrong when you have replaced more than two garbage disposals in your lifetime. Shouldn’t our business model include a period of ownership where we are not either making payments or making repairs on an item? 

Yet we shelf our phones, laptops, netbooks, and tablets and replace them with new.  We accept the need to change because we are told that we aren’t going to be part of the herd if we don’t have the latest and greatest widget.

One of the new corporate phrases is “management of change”, a result of seeing lost productivity/continuity when people, projects, or programs are abruptly changed.  Perhaps we need to look at management of change when new technology is pressed upon us. 

Do we realize the total cost of changing an item, not only the item cost, but its required accessories, learning curve, etc?  Will it interface with our old stuff (our historic data)?  

Perhaps if instead of asking if  this new thing allowing us to multitask in a herd approved manner, we should ask about  its sustainability. As we age, our personal space beings to shrink, we need to re-evaluate what is essential.

This entry was posted on March 8, 2013 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.