The Right To Repair Movement Emerges

AUSTIN, Texas - April 18, 2023 - PRLog -- Successful business models are prized for their ability to drive up sales numbers and earn healthy profits – but there is often a cost associated with runaway success: consumers can come to resent what they perceive as unfair business practices.

What we now call the "razor and blades" business model was first popularized in the 1920s by the Gillette razor company. Consumers loved the cheap razors but loathed shelling out for the expensive blades.

The razor and blade model predates Gillette, who was inspired by Standard Oil's practice during the late nineteenth century of selling heavily discounted oil lanterns – and expensive oil to fill them.

Other classic razor and blade examples include Kodak's cheap and cheerful consumer cameras (that used expensive film and disposable flash bulbs) or the more recent introduction of cheap inkjet printers (which require pricy ink cartridges.)

Planned obsolesce is another business model strategy that got its foothold in the late 1920s as GM's head of styling Harley Earl pioneered the annual fall model year change, designed to drive consumer demand by making existing vehicles look out of date.

Critics of planned obsolescence maintain it is inherently wasteful and adds unnecessary burdens on the environment.

Do You Own Your Product Anymore, Or Are You Just Renting It?

These days, offering "connected products" has become the business model of choice, but it too has a downside, as consumers realize they no longer "own" all of their purchases.

This practice started in the software industry, which thanks to the ubiquity of the internet, has shifted to a "software as a service" business model – forcing customers to essentially rent rather than own. The inflection point took place around 2010 – 2012 when Autodesk first made its industry-standard AutoCAD design software available via subscription, followed soon after by Adobe which moved its many creative software offerings (such as Photoshop) to the cloud.

As a business model, software subscriptions are genius. They reduce software piracy and eliminate the costly boom-bust cycle of having to convince users to purchase an upgrade to the latest version.

Yet it turns out the practice of "renting" access to software is not new; in the postwar dawn of IBM's reign over corporate mainframe computers, IBM famously leased their systems (including tabulating cards), never allowing them to be sold outright or copied by other manufacturers – that is until the Justice Department stepped in to reach a 1956 consent decree limiting IBM's monopolistic business practices.

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