I totally disagree. Planned obsolence is the theory of the past that we are living with the consequences of today. Look at Hyudai (and our own brands) cars- their cars were cheap, and low quality. Cheap is great until you get to walk away from your dead car down the side of a busy freeway. Its taken them years to recover from the low quality stigma, to the point where even tho they are actually making good cars, their sales suffer from their old rep. There's also the theory that you sell one bad product, you lose ten customers when your initial customer tells his friends your products suck. The opposite is true if he buys something cheap and it wears extremely well - you get nine extra customers for that. Given our leadership in software and robotics, we should be building plants that turn out cheap high quality products that kill the competion.