This is why Barbasol no longer sends a case of shaving cream to the person that complains their can wouldn't give the full yield because the compressed gas charge wasn't enough ...
you say good stuff.... perhaps if they made GREAT! stuff ... they wouldn't have needed to milk people and provide the "lifetime warranty", nor gone out of business providing support above and beyond the technology they made!
Honestly ... I can see 5 year, 10 year, warranties.. but **ONLY** if you build something to last 6 years, and 11 years respectively. Yeah... we've all suspected the 5 year 100,000 mile warranties are just long enough to keep 90% of the cars on the road past that time and then fall apart like a gelatinous goo ... but really ... can you blame them?
The business model in these united states has been built upon consumptionism. We don't hold onto something till well past its supposed useful life and then do the hand-me-downs, we use it, possibly abuse it, and then throw it away for the NEXT greatest thing to come along since sliced pixels on rye.
So what!, that innovation actually gets fueled by consumption, so what!, that we really have very few needs for this next gen crap; other than to play the next first person shoot-um-up that Joe Somebody says is to die for... or because some geek in the back of the basement of the building NEXT TO the science building found a way to make the GPU add its clock cycles to the cracking of the wep key of the kid down the hall...
The real issue, is that we've never needed more than a decently designed very modest system, and even now we sell people on "Netbook" computers because of the use fits the design (ie. web/email) conceptually. People will work those things till the lettering comes off the keys, because they want the cheapest piece of hardware they can get, to do the most they can for ever AND a day ... just because they don't want to spend three times that amount now; for hardware that CAN do what they *NEED* it to do.. *now* and for their relatively short lived futures.
Yes its a shame ... the company will be closing, they DID make some good stuff, much of which will for-ever, out live the warranty, but because of technological feature creep ... not because the chip fried, or the caps busted ... (I've) got an old Nvidia based card from them that had an electrolytic cap popped and it still worked, how the hell I don't know but I bought a replacement ... not a warranty swap cause it was a 6600 series and we're now rolling back to the triple digits (Newegg special deal from 1pm thru 11pm eastern, OCZ 850 Watt power supply and a GeForce 240, 512 meg for 99 bucks.... go figure) .... but just simply because the next newest fad comes along.. only then do we really need that new video card ... and so we attempt to retask the old in a way that is underwhelming and more befitting of that cards ability.. while we shoot horn rimmed gorgons with laser pistols of tomorrow-morrow land, for that half hour or hour every day ... while the other 99% of the time the card sits there drawing BEZIERS or QIX lines on the screen ....
were previously under “lifetime warranty” as the business is being wound down.
