When is technology obsolete

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Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion. When does technology become obsolete? The concept of obsolescence is not as straightforward as it might appear. They were released for commercial use in the s and would decrease in size, while increasing in storage capacity, over the next few decades.

With the advent of CDs, memory sticks, and the cloud, and the ever-increasing size of software that would no longer fit on a floppy, the disks were widely generally made obsolete by the mids. Cassette tapes are an iconic image of the s , but they can trace their origins to the late s.

But with the advent of the Compact Disk CD , they were practically made extinct by the mids. In fact, it was not uncommon to be able to buy blank ones until only a few years ago.

But as a medium for storage of music, they are pretty much as "dead as the dodo. Betamax was the earliest format of the consumer-grade video cassette tape. It dominated the market until being supplanted in the '80s by VHS.

Despite its crushing defeat by VHS as the standard videocassette format, Betamax continued to be produced until the early s You could even buy blank Betamax cassettes right up to For a time, MiniDisc players were all the rage. These optical-basic digital storage devices had an impressive capacity of up to 1GB. This was ample enough to store up to 45 hours of audio playback. But they were released when the CD was still king and struggled to take dominance.

The advent of MP3 players soon killed them off in around , when Sony stopped making them. By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. By Christopher McFadden. What does it mean for technology to be obsolete? Follow Us on. The maintenance or manufacturing-engineering group, or both, is measured by the cost of maintaining and upgrading equipment and by mishaps like machine downtime.

That is, a group overseeing a certain job should be accountable for the steps it takes to carry it out. The performance of that task should be measurable, moreover. The narrower the task, the narrower the measure.

A factory divided into these functions and evaluated by these measures may operate quite well in a stable environment like that in which U. Pressures on any one of these subgroups to make marginal improvements in performance—like improving quality, reducing inventory, shortening delivery times, and introducing new products at a faster rate—can be handled largely within itself.

Where minor improvements are the goal, one group might ask another to cooperate by adjusting its behavior slightly, as long as such an adjustment does not much affect its own performance rating. Problems do arise, however, when major improvements are called for simultaneously along several dimensions, as is the case with the new manufacturing.

When they operate independently, subgroups simply cannot make dramatic improvements. Yet the help one subgroup gives another may damage its own performance. In trying to slash inventories, for example, many companies have adopted some form of a just-in-time JIT system. Instead of accepting large quantities of purchased materials weekly or monthly, they demand daily or even more frequent deliveries of smaller quantities.

But JIT works best if the company deals with only a few suppliers that, because of their flexibility or their location or both, can respond quickly. Yet the most responsive suppliers may be unable to match the prices of the low-cost suppliers who specialize in large quantities. To make sure they can meet delivery schedules, production supervisors often maintain backup inventories of parts and partially completed products.

At first, reducing these inventories raises the chances that the production group will miss its schedules. People work at cross-purposes also when a company tries to improve quality, compress product development time, or introduce process control technology.

When reject rates go down, quality managers look good, but production workers may look less productive purely in terms of output. The efforts of financial officers to measure performance further confound the manufacturing organization.

Accountants often lack the information necessary to show manufacturing how well or how badly it is doing. When cost accounting was in its infancy, it was easy to allocate the fixed costs of production to particular work centers or products.

The bulk of total production costs was variable costs, primarily direct labor and materials, for which elaborate measurement systems could be developed. Usually this was done by identifying or simply asserting a strong relationship between overhead and one or more variable cost—usually direct labor—and then distributing the overhead according to the amount of that variable cost incurred.

Indirect factory costs—particularly materials control, quality assurance, maintenance and process engineering, and software development—have been growing rapidly. In many companies these now equal from five to ten times their direct labor costs.

Therefore, viewing labor costs as a benchmark by which to distribute all other costs is misguided. Managers in this company are eager to buy parts from vendors instead of making them. Overseeing an increasing number of vendors, however, requires extra staff. This company therefore found its direct labor costs falling while overhead costs rose—driving up its overhead allocation rate for the remaining products and encouraging managers to contract out even more.

This may be an extreme case. But it is not atypical of many companies today driven in unanticipated directions by the apparently innocuous mandates of their accounting systems. Sometimes one part of the system grows faster than others, but eventually it usually can be linked profitably with the rest of the system. In the same way, factories are often modernized through a series of independent projects, each justifiable in its own dollar terms until, eventually, a way is found to link these individual islands of automation into a profitable whole.

Unfortunately, this approach is often not appropriate when moving toward computerized automation. The desired returns materialize only when all these advances are in place. For this reason, a CIM system should be built the way Federal Express built its famous hub-and-spoke system, which revolutionized the overnight-mail delivery business. Building such a system requires a strategic vision, lots of money up front, and a tremendous amount of patience. Paradoxically, even as this new hardware encourages more information sharing across the company, it enables different parts of the manufacturing organization to become more independent of one another.

In fact, the new hardware encourages factories to break up into smaller units—plants-within-the-plant—of cells dedicated to making families of products. These minifactories tend to be tightly integrated, organizationally flat, almost entirely self-managing, and highly responsive to evolving market needs. The net result is reduced labor, reduced overhead, and increased capacity utilization.

The factory that emerges from such changes is likely to be smaller—between a third and a fifth of the size of the traditional factories that generate similar volumes of products.

Incidentally, the new technology can also mean a revolution in relations between the company and the customer or—what is often the same thing—between OEM suppliers and procurement officers. Before the industrial revolution, people sought out craftsmen or small workshops to supply their garments, wagons, arms, and ornaments.

Customers described what they wanted and the craftsmen gave them options for tailoring the product according to their wishes. The service was as important as the product. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Cheyenne Lentz.

Every decade, there seems to be a significant innovation that changes how we live our lives. With these advancements, other technology can become obsolete. Flash drives, cell phones, and cable TV are a few of the things that tech experts suggest could become obsolete in a few decades due to current or predicted advances in technology.

As cloud storage improves, USB drives might not be necessary. Due to their ever-improving camera technology, smartphones could take the place of digital cameras. Tablets will eventually have the capacity and power to replace laptops. Non-autonomous cars may no longer be on the roads by Smart lighting could become the future of lighting in homes.

Retinal implants or some other hands-free system might take the place of cell phones. Computer monitors could be replaced by casting technology. Safe scanning technology will eliminate the need for cash and cash registers.