> “We tried analyzing, how come sales cannot go up quickly? One reason, I hate to say, is the quality of it, how durable it is,” Cai says. “I talk to customers riding [an old] unit. It doesn’t look good because it’s been on the road 12 years. It has 100,000 miles on it. But the machine itself runs very well. And so when you try to sell new units [to those customers] . . . unfortunately, it does hurt us.” Over the past three years, sales were flat on Segway PTs, dropping from 5% of Segway/Ninebot’s revenue to a mere 1.5%, Cai says.

Wow, I resent this so much. Does no one aspire to build reliable products anymore?

It feels like modern capitalism revolves around turning every customer into a recurring stream of income. Selling something once to a lot of people doesn’t allow for infinite growth.