Death-Dating

In Giles Slade's book, Made to Break, He goes into much emphasis upon how companies plan the amount of overall usefulness of an item before it breaks which eventually has to be replaced. In all intents and purposes companies plan the "death-date" of their products so they can keep their markets fresh enough to always have a supply of customers needing a new gadget that they sell. Slade quotes from a magazine called Design News that talks about death-dating and states "The product with the longest life period is not automatically the most economical. Value is a product of time and utility. Diminishing returns is an important part of the economic law of supply and demand and applies to product death dates. Is a product that has served a short, useful lifetime at a satisfactory cost necessarily wasteful? I think not....There is not a product on the market today that could not be improved by using...more expensive materials. Every design is a compromise. Is it wrong, therefore, for designers to be cognizant of the results and to make the compromises accordingly? Certainly not." Pardon my french, but that is a load of crap. Just because guys like David Sarnoff, the once mogul of RCA, found it economically superior to make electronics and other items that only lasted for a specific amount of time as a way to make more money does not make it right. In a lot of ways it is crazy how obsolescence has filtered into our lives. Many of us, scratch that, almost all of us within the worldly population have been born into obsolescence (technological, psychological, etc.). We have accepted it and do not even acknowledge that its there. We preach the quality of items but how many times do we read a review of an item we are thinking about buying, do we see anything regarding durability over a certain length of time? You get that through customers reviews on forums by other people but never the companies. Here is food for thought, how many people who just recently bought an Xbox 360 would be very upset to know that the death-date of their brand new $300 console system was about three years (I know I was, and so were 5 of my friends, all Xbox's crapped out after about 3 years of use)? After that 3 year mark it would only be a matter of time before that green circle around the power button that stayed a happy green, going about its business would eventually turn into the "red light of death" that so many faithful microsoft customers would experience. How many people who are enlightened to "death dates" in general would seek for some sort of reform, demanding government to demand something extra of companies? Well Here is a suggestion. If we are to buy our electronics knowing that at any given time after the "warranty" expires that our electronic crap can take a dump and stop working, maybe there should be death-dates printed on that clever little packaging that suckers us into buying said item. Like the way we buy our milk and bread to see how long it will be good for, there should be death dates on our technological items. Maybe in this sense we can partially re-adjust our technological obsolescence and really appreciate items that strive to the best built and stay workable decades after their purchase. Maybe then our landfills would not be experiencing record breaking numbers of technological waste.