On Standardization

Eli Whitney started a big revolution in the industrial world, when his concept of interchangeable parts brought about the concept of standardization – how the life would be easier for everybody if the parts were made to standard specification and could be used interchangeably, so that one does not have to make specific mating parts. If that was a game changer, then the Engineers at Allout Mosquito Repellant have gone a step further. They have achieved what I would like to call a one way standardization. Here is a description. I had a Good Knight vaporizer machine, and I was shopping my stock of refills. The shop did not have Good Knight, so I accepted All-Out refills – a lot of them (my monthly stock). Only to discover, once home, that the darned things won’t fit in the vaporizer machine. That was strange – since till then I had only seen interchangeable refills vis-à-vis machines from any brand. Why would Allout do this suicidal thing? Then I saw that the empty Good Knight refill fit snugly in the Allout Cap ( a proxy for the Allout vaporizer cavity). Then it hit me – the geniuses at Allout had made some design change, so that while Good Knight machine will not fit their refills, the Allout machine would fit both its own as well as Good Knight. Effectively, it was an effort to make hapless people, who had bought Allout refills, in good faith, for their Good Knight machines, buy Allout machines. It was a gamble – either the customer can chuck the refill in the dustbin / return it and get a fresh Good Knight one, or he may go –‘Oh, what the hell’, and get an Allout Machine – which fits both refills. Or, he may be like me – I compared both the refills and noticed that the Allout guys had changed the stopper design a little bit. So I took my cork screw and changed the stopper on the refills – and I was still using the Allout refill with a Good Knight machine. This was mankind’s triumph over evil corporate designs to cheat hapless consumers