You Didn't See It Coming

James Dyson, the salesman of (slightly crap) vacuum cleaners to the middle classes?

I believe he was called out by those middles classes for advocating Brexit to "boost British industry" and invest in Britain, then promptly shifting his operations to Singapore.

His modus operandi is to take something that has an inherent compromise, which exists for a specific reason, and to remove that compromise, thereby slightly improving one thing at the larger expense of something else.

The most obvious example is his vacuum cleaners - his big "innovation" was to remove the bag, which exists to make it easy to empty and to stop the dust from clogging up the workings of the machine, at the expense of a very small amount of suction power. Reviews everywhere say the same thing, always - they last no time at all before the suction power drops substantially because of the clogging-up. I've heard so many times about people making money by rescuing and reselling dumped Dyson vacuum cleaners that "just" needed dismantling and thoroughly cleaning.

Another example is hand dryers - basically just increase the power at the expense of (1) deafening noise and (2) blasting damp germ-filled air everywhere, for which they had to be banned from being installed at any NHS site in the UK, notwithstanding their marketing claims about somehow purifying the blasted air.

He's clearly a brilliant businessman - he's made a fortune from selling these items via top-notch marketing. But he's wrongly described as an "inventor", one of those words a certain class of people love to call themselves. At what point does the act of removing a carefully-designed compromise feature (a fix to one issue at the relatively small expense of something else - a net positive) from an existing piece of equipment, become inventing something new?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/feb/09/noki...

Often these things lead to wrong motivations for people who consider them as experts