10/20/2005

Carpet Swiffer

Proctor and Gamble's magic carpet sweeper is going to revolutionize the vacuum industry. According to Business Week online P and G invented a new type of swiffer but it works for carpet. It is surprisingly simple but it also is very effective. If you were to crush up some cheerios place them on the carpet and then drag a piece of cardboard across the top of them pressing the edge against the carpet at an angle what would happen? The cheerios would spring up in the air. If you attached a balloon charged with static electricity to the cardboard, the balloon would attract the pieces of cereal. This is how the carpet swiffer works. P and G has been trying to invent a product like this for some time and was finally able to do so. I wonder what this is going to do to the vacuum industry. Will Proctor and Gamble take market share from vacuum companies or will their new invention simply create a whole new market. I suppose that everyone only has a limited amount of income and we must decide where we are going to allocate those resources, so they would have to take it from other industries. My prediction is that there will be a combination of the two, where market share will be stolen from the vacuum industry but there will also be a whole new industry in which people will spend money they would not have otherwise.

1 comment:

Dr. Tufte said...

-1 on Sara's post for a grammatical error.

I read about this but haven't tried it yet. It sounds like a pretty neat trick.

My guess is that this is going to create a new market rather than change much in the vacuum cleaner market.