Companies strive to build a better (more expensive) light bulb

[Gerald]

Willis Glassgow/AP - Flames heat glass light bulbs before stems are attached at American Light Bulb Manufacturing in Mullins, S.C., on March 28, 2011. Incandescent bulbs are being phased out under federal law in favor of energy-efficient compact fluorescents.

SOMERSET, N.J. — Ed Crawford wants to unscrew 130 years’ worth of the light bulb’s history. But how many MBAs, engineers and lobbyists will it take to help him do that?

As retailers and governments begin phasing out incandescent light bulbs, lighting companies are scrambling to introduce products and change public mind-sets about how much a light bulb should cost. Crawford has a big challenge ahead of him: He’s chief executive of the North American lighting division of the world’s largest lighting company, Philips Electronics.

“Our marketing mix has to become more creative,” Crawford says while walking the halls of the Philips offices, past rooms where high-tech displays show how lighting affects moods in kitchens and living areas.Philips has been hiring marketers and engineers from consumer products companies to prepare for the change. Its North American headquarters in suburban New Jersey is a short drive from the red-brick labs where Thomas Edison developed and improved early light bulb technology.Scientists at the world’s major lighting companies — General Electric, Philips and Siemens AG subsidiary Osram-Sylvania — are creating more expensive compact fluorescent bulbs, halogen bulbs and light emitting diode (LED) bulbs for retailers to offer instead of the incandescent bulbs they have sold for more than a century.Why now?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...DkL_story.html

Note: Sunday, October 16, 2:25 AM

[soopaman2]

http://www.centennialbulb.org/

They used to build em so good.