[wpietri]

> I don't understand why market forces haven't bankrupted them.

I think the short answer is that companies spend many hundreds of billions each year manipulating the market. Instead of going to all the hard work of building a trusted brand, you can just buy one people have a vague familiarity with, spend a bunch on marketing, and ship cheap garbage until the brand value has been reduced to zero.

[denton-scratch]

Yes, I get that.

But why are they making machines out of parts they know are defective? Why are they not incentivised to fix the design? For example, a washing-machine electronic control panel with a defective circuit design, which meant that a certain diode was overloaded, and would reliably burn out a short while out of warranty.

Electronic control panels for white goods are incredibly expensive. Come to that, if you started from scratch to build (e.g.) a washing machine from manufacturer's parts, you'd have to sell your house. If the parts really cost that much, it's a wonder they can sell their own version so cheaply.

[wpietri]

I think you're implying a unity to them, a coherence, that just doesn't exist. I think the more salient question would be something much longer involving the incentives of a half-dozen different people at a company that is mainly optimized for the wealth and ego of various high-status actors. The long-term incentives for effective operations are there, but they're blunted by managerialist priorities and overwhelmed by the short-term incentives for producing cash ASAP.