PRODUCT OBSOLESCENCE

The greatest threat to any product, is, lack of enough research as to what the customers want. Although there are some industries which invest a great deal of amount in knowing this, they eventually fail at some point or the other.
The greatest threat to any industry is “product obsolescence”. This essentially, is a point at which the product an industry produces becomes completely irrelevant to its target users. Although an industry does enough research to understand its target audience’s requirements, a product can go irrelevant to the same due to competitive alternatives that spring up. In order to avoid irrelevancy, continuous improvisation of existing product offering as well as, innovation, irrespective of need and growth is absolutely mandatory.
Product obsolescence is found in many industries, the bitter truth is, industries that are now successful were not always taking measures to avoid irrelevancy but they were lucky enough to have opportunities that made them relevant at all point of time. The greatest example to this phenomenon is the “petroleum industry”. A quick snapshot as to how this industry's products became obsolete and how luck helped them to stay relevant is given below.
When oil lamps started using kerosene, the petroleum industry was thinking that it was blessed with humongous growth, because, it thought, it had the job of lighting the world, which, of course, was true. The industry thought, this growth can never be stopped, and hence, the industry concentrated and invested more on devising methods that facilitated agile manufacturing of kerosene. Then, the impossible happened; Edison invented the incandescent lamp, which did the job of lighting the world without depending on kerosene. A crisis the petroleum industry failed to notice in advance, because, they believed strongly that a completely new alternative to kerosene would never come. Luckily, kerosene got the opportunity to power, space heaters, which saved it from a humongous downfall. After sometime, space heaters were replaced by domestic central heating systems, which used coal, thereby, making kerosene irrelevant again. Kerosene’s luck struck for the second time, when, the internal combustion engine was invented, which initially used kerosene for power. When combustion engine started using other fuels, wartime demand for aviation fuel increased. After this, expansion of domestic aviation and dieselization of rail roads kept the luck of the petroleum industry above bar.
The inventions mentioned in the above paragraph, namely, the incandescent lamp, the internal combustion engine, the space heater, although, contributed by people outside the petroleum industry had humongous impact on the prospects of this industry. Not every industry would be as lucky as the petroleum industry when it comes to downfall due to product obsolescence, because, every time its product went obsolete, new opportunities that made its products relevant cropped up. Hence, a lot of time and effort must be spent, to predict obsolescence of a product, even when the industry seems “all izz well”.