Trapped on Technology’s Trailing Edge
April 15th, 02008 by Kurt Bollacker 
There’s a very good article in this month’s IEEE Spectrum about the engineering challenges of replacement parts for devices intended to survive much longer than industrial cycles of obsolescence. The economics of making sure parts are available in a timely and cost effective fashion and task of designing management processes that survive long enough are discussed in depth. From the article:
Obsolescence also isn’t limited to hardware. Obsolete software can be just as problematic, and frequently the two go hand in hand. For example, an obsolescence analysis of a GPS radio for a U.S. Army helicopter found that a hardware change that required revising even a single line of code would result in a $2.5 million expense before the helicopter could be deemed safe for flight.
My favorite example device is the B52 bomber. First produced in 1946, it’s not expected to be phased out till 2017. I guess this is equivalent to 10,000 “internet years”.
April 20th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
A few thoughts on this… When I buy a small gadget these days (e.g. digital camera, PDA) I often consider buying two. The first would be the working machine, but the second is a backup. Part of the problem of acquiring these devices is not only replacement parts* (since models change so rapidly) but also learning the new operating systems for them. The time investment to learn the new system is not insignificant.
* For some gadgets there are no replacement parts - we’re simply forced to buy a new gadget.
July 13th, 2008 at 5:43 am
A problem long familiar to people who work in IT. Every organization has at least one legacy system that is the bane of the application developers (who have to maintain the code) and the operations guys (who have to take care of the hardware and maintain sysadmin skills to manage it.