One of the most interesting things about these teardowns to me, is that they tell a narrative far beyond the tool itself. So I get to learn about the tool, but I also get to learn about the company.

You know that when something like this happens it's not just the designer who doesn't know their stuff. You know that the person who hired that designer doesn't know their stuff either, because they couldn't tell the difference between an employee who makes good decisions and one who makes poor decisions. And so on, usually all the way to the top. Ikea isn't a company that makes bad tools, Ikea is a company that makes bad decisions.

Something like Princess Auto or Harbor Freight makes good decisions. Not good tools, but good decisions. You know that they have smart engineers who cut all kinds of corners, but they cut those corners intelligently to save money and they generally don't cut the corners that would most significantly wreck the quality. These companies specialize in making cheap tools.

Princess Auto, as we've seen in another of AvE's videos, occasionally sabotages their own tools for planned obsolescence reasons. Engineered to fail. I actually have more respect for them to be doing that, because at least it's not done out of incompetence, it's done as a money grab.

The Dewalt and Makita teardowns we learned that these companies are pushing hard for a tool that will last a long time and be superior quality than their competitors. And not just their cheap competitors like Harbor Freight, but their higher quality contemporaries. Cheapness is secondary to making a better tool and they generally only cut corners that don't have a big impact on quality.

One of my favorite observations is when someone (Steve Jobs?) pointed out the difference between Pepsi and Xerox. Xerox became the name for copying because it solved a problem leagues better than anyone else could. The people who became successful and rose through the ranks in Xerox were people who had the best problem solving and design, because that's what Xerox valued. Pepsi on the other hand never innovates, it makes minor tweaks perhaps once every decade. So the people who stood out in Pepsi as those that brought it success were the marketing people. Those were the people who got promoted, and those were the people who ended up running the company.

What happens when you take the CEO of Pepsi, a guy who only values brand and marketing, and put him in charge of Xerox? It took a company that succeeded on its merits and ignored those merits as if they would exist forever as long as it had good marketing. It lasted a little while, and then lost its way.