Well, let’s face it, needless complexity is really the key issue on this blog, isn’t it?

Today, at the office, there was a repairman working on our pop machine. He’s been working on it for several days.

The machine in question is very entertaining to watch. Rather than dropping a bottle down a chute in traditional fashion, it has a robotic mechanism that will zip up to the appropriate level, turn a screw that will push one bottle into its “hand”, then bring it to the bottom, slide it all the way to the right, and drop the bottle in a short chute where it can be retrieved. It doesn’t shake up the product or risk breaking a bottle if it’s glass.

I briefly discussed this with the repairman, though, in a conversation that started with “You’re still here?!?” In the conversation, I mentioned remembering an old-style pop machine, where you would insert your change, open a tall, narrow refrigerator door, grab the bottle of your choice by the neck, and pull. All the machine had to do was unlock the clamps around the bottles so you could pull one out. An interlock kept you from pulling more than one bottle at a time (it would lock the other clamps as soon as one started to open). A new bottle would roll into place as soon as you pulled one out. It was wicked simple, and it worked like a charm. It was over 20 years old when I first saw it, and it still worked perfectly. It was over 30 years old when it was finally replaced because it couldn’t be configured for the higher price.

Entertainment value aside, what is the point of the complexity in this new-style machine? Perhaps more to the point, what is its cost, not just in technology, but in lost sales because it is broken?