Phoebus Cartel

I live in Eindhoven, home town of Philips, one of the members of this cartel. Philips is extremely loved here. They're the reason this city is a city at all, they're the reason we're a prosperous region with of lots of innovation (mostly hardware though, so not very HN-fashionable). We now have apartment buildings named after their founders ("Gerard", "Anton", etc), lunchrooms ("Meneer Frits"), the local football stadium & club are named after them, and so on. Statues. Statues! Not…

Reading up on it, it seems like the justification for creating Phoebus was to standardize the industry (it's the reason all of our lightbulbs today follow the same rating system and screw in the same way). But clearly they ran amok to serve their own interests. Cartels are very interesting: historically few are successful long term - there is too much incentive for newcomers to undercut prices. They need something to keep new entrants at bay. It seems like in…

The planned obsolescence of incandescent light bulbs is largely a myth. While there are plenty of real examples of planned obsolescence, with incandescent light bulbs there are engineering tradeoffs between longevity and efficiency. Basically, the longer lasting a bulb is, the dimmer and less efficient it is. If you've ever seen any of the supposed 100 year old bulbs, you'll notice that they're extremely dim. Before, during, and after the Phoebus cartel incandescent light bulbs were (and still are!) standardized…