Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote a poem entitled “The One
Hoss Shay”, that still is referenced by people associated with product design
and development. It is about a mythical
vehicle that is so well designed and crafted that it lasts 100 years without
failing in any way, and then completely collapses as all of the parts
simultaneously reach the end of their life span. If you want to read it, look
here.
More of such balance in reliability and durability would be
nice in modern products. Many products
are annoying because some parts fail much earlier and more often than others,
until finally these parts are no longer available and the whole product is
junked.
But there is another type of balance, having more to do with
quality. The photo is of my wife Marian
in her 2004 Acura TSX, leaving early in the morning to control the world. We bought the car new to make up for a
beloved Honda CRX that she drove for 18 years, until an evil person roared out
of a driveway and destroyed it. She didn’t want a big car, needed to drive
grand-kids and friends around, likes nimble and responsive cars, and at times
can be a mild hot-rodder. The TSX is
neither the fastest, the most beautiful, the most luxurious, the roomiest, or the
best handling automobile available, but it is pretty good on all fronts. She has loved it absolutely for eight years. For her (and actually for me) it is an
extraordinary blend. It is based on the so-called European Accord body (a bit
smaller than the Accord sold in the U.S.)
It has front wheel drive and the engine produces about 200 horsepower
and is easy on fuel. It goes faster than
either of us needs it to and is fitted with plenty of digital gadgets—Navigation
system, climate control, sound system— but not so many that we will die messing
with them while driving (a friend of mine has ceded the driving to his wife
while he attends to the much more elaborate navigation system, the cell phones,
the doors and windows, the TV, the climate control and sound system, and so on.)
The TSX is also clearly a product of Honda, and we have always liked such
things.
I spoke of David Garvin’s now classic article in the Nov 1,
1987 Harvard Business Review, entitled “Competing on the Eight Dimensions of
Quality” in my post of Nov. 1, 2012. The
dimensions he discusses are performance, features, reliability, conformance,
durability, serviceability, aesthetics, and perceived quality. The TSX gets
high grades on all of them. In my book
Good Products, Bad Products, I discuss performance and cost, human fit, craftsmanship,
emotional response, aesthetics, cultural fit, and global fit. The TSX also gets high grades on all of them.
In the design, development, and marketing of many products,
we often tend to emphasize only a few components of quality. These days we are excited about digital
control. I just bought a new
dishwasher. Since the old one failed in
its rather complicated control circuitry, and since I couldn’t find replacement
parts that I considered reasonably priced, I bought a new one with the fewest
cycles and options I could find. I
finally found one with only(?) five possible cycles, three options, a delay,
and a large row of warning lights. Of
course, we only use the “normal” button. The dishwasher will probably fail because of
the circuitry necessary to allow it to do something we don’t ever use. As people used to say when I worked at the
Jet Propulstion Lab, “Reliability is fewer parts”—that's electrical as well as mechanical.
Good Products should rate high in all components of quality—just
like the One Hoss Shay did in reliability and durability.
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