Good Products, Bad Products: Essential Elements to Achieving Superior Quality

Introduction

This is a book on quality. It focuses on products of technology and industry and argues that in the long term, the best products prevail, positively affecting and advancing the individuals, organizations, and nations that produce and use them as well as the human race as a whole. If we produce things that do not serve us well, they will fail in the marketplace, or in extreme cases, we will actively turn against them—for example, consider the use of poison gas in warfare, or chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in refrigeration. Throughout the book, I emphasize hardware products, since that is where my background and interest lie, but the content can easily be extrapolated to less physically tangible products. I also focus on so-called consumer ...