vobios.blog

You had to have seen it coming. Even The Onion wrote about it. Then it finally happened. Gillette announced it will soon start selling a five-blade razor called Fusion. And, according to BusinessWeek, “Gillette managed to develop Fusion and Fusion Power for slightly less than the $680 million it spent on Mach3 seven years ago”. Sure it takes money to develop a brand new shaving system. You have to add the extra blades, adjust the angles, play with the spacing, and finally test the product. It boggles my mind how inefficient a company has to be to dump hundreds of millions into this process.

Money aside, the quest for innovation and development of new products is turning into a deadly spiral. You can keep adding more blades for a while, but there must be some sanity line that cannot be crossed. You can’t just add them forever. You’ll end up with some sort of a sandpaper-like device. Perhaps that is the final solution.