Not Necessarily Toast

In Consumed: Back to Basics Egg & Muffin Toaster: How makers of a decades-old appliance still find new ways to catch consumer interest.

In a recent issue of The M.I.T. Sloan Management Review, Michael Schrage, a business writer and an M.I.T. researcher, challenged the thinking of a prominent Columbia Business School professor. More specifically, he challenged what Bruce Greenwald, whose work focuses on finance and investing, has said about the fate of all innovative technologies: “In the long run, everything is a toaster.” That is to say, even the most impressive breakthrough eventually becomes mundane, with all producers offering more or less identical versions of the same item and competing largely on the basis of price: innovation runs its course, and the thing becomes a commodity.

Schrage’s article, “The Myth of Commoditization,” argued that not only is this not true of technological breakthroughs, it’s not even true of toasters. “Heated bread lacks the high-tech cachet of multicore processors or polymerase chain reactions,” he wrote, but the “technical evolution” of toasters offers a “case study in profitable innovation.” The Back to Basics Egg & Muffin Toaster seems to offer pretty good evidence in his argument’s favor….

Continue reading at the NYT site by way of this no-registration-required link.

Related links: American Heritage history of the toaster; “Cool Tools” hype for the Egg & Muffin Toaster.

* April 14 Update: Selected reactions from elsewhere:

1) Glass House.

2) Marginal Utility.