GE switches off light bulb business after almost 130 years

Doesn’t that also depend on the quality of components and assembly? Cheap LED bulbs usually skimp on smoothing the output of the AC/DC converter, on LED quality, or heat sinking (I’ve seen teardowns of bulbs with no thermal compound, or even no heatsink at all).

Exmoor• 6 years ago

What kind of bulbs are you using? I've had a similar experience the OP with LED bulbs using the Feit ones sold at Costco. At some point I read about a design issue where manufacturers are using cheap components which die much faster than the actual LED's wear out, so even though the LED's are rated for 50,000 hours, the bulb itself will stop working after 10,000 hours (made up numbers). I would will to spend a bit more if I could be confident that I was going to get a bulb that actually lasted the lifespan of the LEDs.

Karunamon• 6 years ago

I've had a grand total of two failures in 5 years. One was a cheap $5 on sale special from the hardware store, the other was a Phillips Hue (!)

ascagnel_2• 6 years ago

I find LED bulbs last forever, with the caveat that instead of a notable failure (eg a bulb burning out with a loud pop), the bulb will start to fall off from its maximum brightness once you start getting past the 5-year mark. I've also noticed that bulbs kept well below their max brightness (50-80%) can maintain that level longer.

hinkley• 6 years ago

What kind of fixtures are you using?

LEDs - or compact fluorescent before that - in a torchière? Last forever. Recessed lighting, enclosed or narrow lamps? Maybe a couple times as long as an incandescent.

entangledqubit• 6 years ago

I bought about a dozen GE LED bulbs a couple of years ago due to the quality of their light. Sadly, in that short amount of time about 75% of them have either outright failed or developed some other condition that made me question their safety.

ryanobjc2• 6 years ago

My LED bulbs last until they break. And depending on who made them, they break a lot.

All my philips hue bulbs still work. Even the ones that are like 8 years old. But every bulb from ikea has broken.

econcon2• 6 years ago

Quality of grid has huge influence on life of LED. Basically, the drive circuit needs to be of pretty robust to guard against voltage fluctuations and surges which kill led.

Not sure if there is something user can do to protect their house from grid quality issues.

tialaramex• 6 years ago

It's often possible to choose DC for the final metres to the lamp itself, whereupon you've reduced the problem to ensuring you deliver a nice clean DC feed or nothing. As a side benefit to the extent you're successful you also eliminate flicker, which some people find extremely annoying in LEDs.

You may find that your retail options for DC lamps are more limited depending on where you shop, and it will likely require a more extensive change than just unscrewing a "bulb" and putting a new one in but it's an option. Certainly worth considering if you're remodelling for example.

downerending6• 6 years ago

I'm not a power electricity guy, but I think of the power grid as an absolutely massive flywheel, electrically speaking. I don't get how the electric company could introduce surges, even if they wanted to. (I have 200A service, which I don't use much of.)

buescher• 6 years ago

You can have a whole house surge protector installed at your electrical panel. These cost about $50-$200 at a home store. When I did, I had an electrician install it while I was having other work done on the panel.

jotm2• 6 years ago

How so? Aren't LED bulbs powered by a standard switch mode power supply? Those are very tolerant of the input voltage.

genocidicbunny• 6 years ago

Are you putting your LED bulbs in enclosed spaces? The cheaper ones tend to be very prone to overheat if they're not adequately ventilated, which really reduces their life (and can change their color a bit too.)

Make sure that if you're putting LED bulbs in enclosed spaces, that they're designed to handle that.

agumonkey• 6 years ago

I knew about LED heat dissipation issues but I'd be surprised if at equivalent light output the incandescent would heat less..

downerending6• 6 years ago

Some are, though I haven't tried to track the correlation.

Also, I'm lumping in compact fluorescent bulbs, which perhaps account for most of the failures.

An additional annoying detail is that one or two of my fixtures dim in one way or another. I put "dimmable" bulbs in them, but I'm somewhat dubious as to their actual capability in that application.

pkaye• 6 years ago

Probably because even LEDs have become a low margin business. I've a bunch of the Chinese brand LED bulbs from Amazon and they last for years and there is so much variety. In terms of LED bulb longevity, I think a big part is heat dissipation so the heatsink size and fixture design are critical.

WalterBright3• 6 years ago

LED bulbs don't last if they are in an enclosed fixture, because the heat buildup fries them. Most incandescent fixtures are enclosed.

twblalock2• 6 years ago

There are some that are rated for enclosed fixtures. I've been using a few for several years now, 100W incandescent equivalent, and I haven't had a problem.

karatestomp• 6 years ago

It's not just you, though my LEDs do on average last longer than incandescents, it's just that quite a damn few die in under 6 months. Not like CFLs, which gave off terrible light and failed very fast— I was very unhappy when it seemed like those would be what replaced incandescents.

Now I just need LEDs to drop to 1/3 their current price for the nicer-quality (might outlast an incandescent) bulbs and I won't feel like I'm getting ripped off in this whole deal. If I buy the ones that are a mere 60% the price of nice bulbs then they go back to the CFL behavior of dying constantly and quickly.

(I've used LED bulbs across three houses with build ages between 20 and 0 years at move-in, so I don't think it's something wrong with my house, and incandescents have done about as well as they ever do in all three)

tzs• 6 years ago

Around the end of 2016, I replaced almost every incandescent in my house with Great Value LEDs from Walmart, when they had some sort of arrangement for an automatic at-the-register rebate from my power company that made them $0.17 each.

The only one that has failed since then was one that I dropped from about 8 feet up onto the concrete floor of my garage. I gave to a curious coworker who took it apart. There was some component (an inductor I think, but don't remember for sure) that was attached to the PCB only by a couple thin wires, and one of those wires had broke.

I measured the output of all of them with a lux meter. A few months ago, I measured again and they are all about the same as they were when new. In particular, I didn't see any definite difference between ones that I've used for hours every day for 3.5 years, and ones that have seen maybe 5 minutes use in that same time.

wenc3• 6 years ago

I'm surprised GE stuck around in a commodity business for so long. Lighting is something we'll always need but the prices are so low these days that I wonder what their margins are.

Also, not sure what's next after LEDs.

knodi1232• 6 years ago

Cloud-based lighting? All you need is a hole in your roof. I can't figure out a pricing structure, though.

jotm2• 6 years ago

Free for 8 hours/day, then you have to pay.

phkahler• 6 years ago

Fiber to the home.

CyberDildonics3• 6 years ago

Time to reify your lightbulbs with serverless cloud smart lights using AI and the Deepest Machine Learning Neural Networks so you can finally stop buying $1 lights at the dollar store. We'll call them green lights (but not because they are good for the environment).

Kihashi2• 6 years ago

Most of Consumer Lighting had already been sold off. They were working on services like lightgrid management for cities. But even 30 years ago, Lighting was one of the smallest parts of GE.

wenc3• 6 years ago

Good point.

Philips Lighting is a competitor, and they have a similar portfolio of non-consumer lighting solutions, like UV-C lighting, lighting-as-a-service (financial product), city/building/warehouse/airport lighting, etc.

https://www.lighting.philips.com/main/home

I was about to say there's also specialized lighting niches where margins might be higher, like airfield lighting (GE Aviation lighting). Maybe the installation contract costs are where they make their money, because their consumables are not that expensive (<$100).

https://airportlighting.com/airport-lighting-manufacturer-br...

An elevated runway light costs $17.76.

Shivetya• 6 years ago

Considering how far the pricing has fallen on good LED lighting it would take a significant breakthrough to displace them. I was able to replace nearly all the lighting in my house late last year and earlier this year.

LED lighting today is leaps and bounds better than just a few years ago and magnitudes cheaper. I have found replacements for all bulb types I have use of.

WalterBright3• 6 years ago

I have fluorescent tubes in the garage. There are plenty of LED replacement tubes, but all of them emit a lot less lumens. I'm faced with having a dimly lit garage or adding more light circuits.

Since I work in the garage, having it dimly lit is a problem. Also, I have the age problem of my eyes losing the ability to change their focal length. Bright lighting alleviates much of this.

ChrisRR• 6 years ago

I did pretty much the same with the Ikea LED lights, which aren't too pricey.

user5994461• 6 years ago

My company was renovating their headquarters in New York and I am pretty sure the entire building was to be equipped with LED by GE.

I bet lightning is good business (for big buildings) and definitely a core thing to provide as part of electricity (re)installations.

Scoundreller4• 6 years ago

Nice thing about LED is that it can be a drop-in replacement for 277VAC fixtures common in US commercial/industrial settings.

Though there are warehouses full of 277 fluorescent fixtures and ballasts that nobody wants.

cobookman• 6 years ago

Wireless Sensors in Lightbulbs to empower smart building applications.

phone8675309• 6 years ago

Given the following video on GE Lighting’s YouTube account, I would imagine that what’s next after (smart) LEDs is a better company that cares about the end user producing a better product at a fraction of the price: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1BB6wj6RyKo

coronadisaster• 6 years ago

wow, what a nightmare to reset...

PhantomGremlin• 6 years ago

That video was even better before they deleted the comments. Those were great. I saved a few choice ones:

Resetting a lightbulb. What a time to be alive.

Next time I feel like I hate my job, I'm going to think about the poor actor who had to narrate this horrorshow just to put food on the table.

That's the funniest thing I've seen in a while. 10/10 would reset again.

1960s: In 50 years we will have flying cars and holidays on the moon 2019: How to factory reset your light bulbs

This is the funniest video I've seen in weeks! You have created the ultimate 21st century light bulb joke

this isn't the cyberpunk future I wanted

This shit is hilarious!.. Could you imagine if this was real?

As an engineer, you know it's time to pick a new career when the video documentation of your product winds up on CNN...

If it really were a smart bulb it would beg for death.

chmaynard• 6 years ago

I fail to see why innovation in the lighting space is not a worthy endeavor for GE. By analogy, personal computers are a commodity business but Apple hasn't abandoned the Mac (yet).

derefr• 6 years ago

What leads you to believe that GE was ever innovating in the lighting space?

...after Edison, I mean.

AFAIK GE’s lighting business, from the start, has just been riding on the fact that (incandescent, halogen, and even fluorescent) lightbulbs were both fragile and required nasty chemicals to make, and so a large company like GE can get better economies of scale on production than their smaller competitors—by either having large contracts with channel partners, or by just vertically integrating all the way down to mining and all the way up to distribution logistics.

selectodude• 6 years ago

Apple has figured out a way to de-commodify their computer business. Mac OS is a value add that nobody else has. Light bulbs are light bulbs.

musicale• 6 years ago

Also, not sure what's next after LEDs.

The latest and greatest LED lighting still looks awful to me - it seems fuzzy and unpleasant even though it appears yellowish rather than the harsh blue or weird glowing violet of earlier LED bulbs.

The spectrum from an incandescent bulb seems so much better.

I greatly prefer the low power, low heat, and long life of LED bulbs, but I just can't get past the awful light that comes from them.

CyberDildonics3• 6 years ago

I wish it would become more common to put a lot of different spectrum LEDs on a bulb (really on the PCB that has the LEDs since the 'bulb' is just a diffuser).

chiefgeek• 6 years ago

Totally agree. I'm not a fan of the residential LED light bulbs that I have. Even though they are supposed to be 3200ºK there's weird color fringing at the penumbra and they cause a lot of metamerism on certain materials. And these bulbs were around $20/ea.

nicoburns2• 6 years ago

Look into High CRI bulbs (incandescents have CRI 100, anything from CRI 95 upwards is pretty good). They exist, they're just a bit niche still, so you have to be looking for them

EricE• 6 years ago

As others point out, just pay attention to specs. Anything with a CRI of 95 or higher will be virtually impossible to differentiate from incandescent.

nicoburns2• 6 years ago

Better quality LEDs I expect. High CRI (>95) bulbs have much higher light quality than your average LED , and they haven't made their way into the mainstream yet.

wenc3• 6 years ago

Though they're not mainstream, seems like they're pretty affordable these days. Thanks for the info.

Not > 95 CRI, but seems like 95 CRI Philips bulbs ($11).

https://www.prolampsales.com/products/philips-470159-78mr16-...

Some highish CRI (90-93) bulbs are a few bucks ($1-$7)

https://www.1000bulbs.com/category/led-a19-lights-high-cri/

Ushio ColourMax, 96 CRI ($9.97)

https://www.lampline.com/ushio-colourmax-led-par16-sp15-ww30...

fomine3• 6 years ago

I'm looking into this but maybe can't be efficient.

https://www.mitsubishielectric.com/en/about/rd/research/high...

pstrateman• 6 years ago

That's sad the GE bulbs were high quality.

kjaftaedi• 6 years ago

I think you might have missed their ridiculous 'smart' bulbs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BB6wj6RyKo

gundmc• 6 years ago

I have to do this every month or two to reset my bricked lights. This video made me involuntarily twitch. Awful, awful experience.

terracatta2• 6 years ago

GE is literally selling the metaphor for innovation and ideas for $250 million. It's also the last Edison original business.

Curious what others think, but I think they undervalue the brand value they are eroding by divesting from all of these low growth business that were the building blocks of their once great brand?

mlinhares• 6 years ago

I don't think there's many people out there other than Boomers that look at GE as an important brand name. I definitely don't have anything from them nor do I plan to buy anything any time soon.

jjeaff3• 6 years ago

I would think it might carry some weight in the trades though. If I have some electrical component and it says GE on it, I am going to trust it a lot more than a "happy smile electronics" part. Whether that trust is misplaced or not is a different conversation, though.

kube-system3• 6 years ago

FWIW, Forbes ranks them #16 https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/#tab:rank

nucleardog• 6 years ago

I think they're probably fine without your dollars or mindshare.

I suspect part of the reason they're getting out of a lot of this commodity (or borderline commodity) businesses is because they make much more money on building power plants and wind turbines, jet engines, medical equipment (MRI/CT/PET/etc machines and more), etc.

Some quick digging, and it looks like their lighting and industrial controls division made all of $300m in profit. Their aviation products alone profited over $28b.

If I were them, I wouldn't care either.

fennecfoxen3• 6 years ago

Sure, it's a classic metaphor, but is sticking with the same basic product for over a hundred years really "innovation" in any meaningful sense?

kube-system3• 6 years ago

I don't think GE was a big driving factor behind the innovation that has happened in the lighting industry in recent history, but they manufacture products that aren't incandescent bulbs.

dv_dt2• 6 years ago

Considering that the GE brand is mostly likely to be encountered by consumers is the appliance line, and that division and branding was sold to a Chinese company in 2016, I think this brand erosion is just another chunk of company brand falling into the sea.

jimbob45• 6 years ago

This should be the top comment. GE effectively has nothing to do with the lightbulb brand anymore. They don't even own the naming rights to use their own name on lightbulbs that they could (but don't) make.

terracatta2• 6 years ago

Yeah it's definitely part of a pattern of behavior that started with the ouster of Immelt.

Basically the start of their downfall was Trian Partners, an activist investor, bought $2.5 billion of GE stock in 2015 with the express goal of GE taking on a ton of debt to do share buybacks and raise the dividend

https://steveblank.com/2017/11/01/why-ges-jeff-immelt-lost-h...

legitster• 6 years ago

To me, this is like when IBM sold off the last of their computer line. It's a little sad, but I also don't want to buy a product from a company that has no incentive or priority to sell or service it.

DerekL• 6 years ago

IBM sold their personal computer business. They still make mainframes, and they design (but don't fabricate) POWER microprocessors.

unnouinceput• 6 years ago

250M USD only for an entire division? That's pocket change. I wonder why such a low price.

Kihashi2• 6 years ago

Most of GE's consumer lighting business had already been sold off. Also, Lighting was never a super large part of GE by revenue or profit.

someonehere• 6 years ago

Does this mean they’re ending the C by GE bulb line? They’re the IoT connected bulbs.

ihuman• 6 years ago

Does anyone here use their zigbee or z-wave switches? I was considering getting them, but if they're leaving the lighting business then I might not.

dnr• 6 years ago

If you look at reviews of Z-Wave dimmers and switches, as I did recently, GE seems to be not very well regarded, and on the expensive side. Some of the newer brands like Zooz and Inovelli have a lot more features and are cheaper too. I narrowed it down to those two and then recently replaced a bunch of switches with Zooz products. Happy so far. (Can't speak for zigbee.)

vulcan01• 6 years ago

My parents bought them for our whole house. 4 years and they still work well :)

jmb12686• 6 years ago

I have over a dozen in wall GE z-wave switches and dimmers in my home. They have been working great for years.

tonyb• 6 years ago

The GE switches are made by Jasco. I have a few different brands of zwave switches and the GE/jesco ones are my favorite. The newest version is much more compact and they auto sense line and load so they are much easier to fit in the existing boxes.

emmelaich2• 6 years ago

Visiting the USA, I was surprised at how much advertising there was for GEICO. Multiple ads per hour on various channels.

GE has been a finance and insurance company for some time.

brianwawok• 6 years ago

Didn’t geico get sold to buffet?

akeck• 6 years ago

Yes.

dennyabraham• 6 years ago

Though they have similar names, GEICO and GE are unrelated businesses. The former is an acronymn for Government Employees Insurance Company, the latter stands for General Electric

nogabebop232• 6 years ago

If you remember 30 Rock, It's just "G" now - they sold the "E" to "Samesung"

emmelaich2• 6 years ago

oh, I'm corrected, thanks.

kstrauser• 6 years ago

To the best of my knowledge, GE and the Government Employees Insurance Company are unrelated.

heartbreak• 6 years ago

GE does have a major finance arm, but as other commenters have said, it isn’t GEICO. It’s called GE Capital. It’s also much smaller than it used to be, because they spun off the consumer credit line of the business as Synchrony Bank several years ago.

coliveira2• 6 years ago

GE is practically a bankrupt company. They are planning to survive by selling assets and using the practically guaranteed bonds provided by the Fed. Nobody knows how long this will work out for them.

Gibbon1• 6 years ago

How long did it take Motorola to sell off the farm?

nogabebop232• 6 years ago

They have almost 300 billion in assets, including 35+ billion in cash. They've cut debt in 1/2 in the past 5 years.

Not exactly "practically bankrupt" but hey, random internet comment...

coliveira2• 6 years ago

That's not the issue. GE has a lot of liabilities in the future, not only loans, but also including billions they will need to cover for their failed insurance business. They under insured long term care and now these costs are skyrocketing. In the past they promised to sell business units to pay these future liabilities, however it seems that their businesses are shrinking, not increasing. If they cannot turn around and improve their business, they won't have enough to sell to cover the growing liabilities.

Insurance liabilities were valued at $38Bi in 2018, and these costs are only going up:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ge-insurance/exclusive-ge...

MintelIE2• 6 years ago

I use incandescents at my home because the alternatives are very RF-noisy. GE's incandescents are (were?) among the worst for life. Thankfully there are American companies making quality incandescents right here at home now.

jjeaff3• 6 years ago

Interesting. Are you trying to reduce rf noise because it interferes with something? How do you measure the RF noise? I have several high quality Bluetooth devices and keep getting occasionally spotty service. I'm thinking it is rf interference.

MintelIE2• 6 years ago

I listen to short wave radio, and my radio itself is an excellent RFI detector. I just wandered around the house with it holding it up to things until I identified the problem. The only things really emitting lots of RF were LED and CFI bulbs, and a couple cheap power supplies for Netgear info-appliances.

Scoundreller4• 6 years ago

I’ve heard garage door openers can be very sensitive.

Incandescents make the plastic go yellow, so people have searched long and hard for a light that doesn’t heat up but still lets you open and close your door.

Animats• 6 years ago

LED bulbs with FCC part 15 certification should be RF-quiet.[1]

If we're going to have anti-China tariffs, a useful thing to do would be to require FCC and UL approval. Power supplies would cost a little more but would not catch fire, and few things would blither all over the RF spectrum.

[1]https://apps.fcc.gov/kdb/GetAttachment.html?id=K0pZdRE7biF3a...

AtomicOrbital• 6 years ago

exactly ... chinese electronics are cheap but of very low quality and yet very RF noisy ... I have burned through several such power adapters ... total junk

frosted-flakes2• 6 years ago

In the winter in cold climates, incandescents are fine anyway. They're 100% efficient because the "waste" heat is still being utilized, particularly if the building is heated electrically anyway.

chiefalchemist• 6 years ago

I recently finished reading "Imagine It Forward" by Beth Comstock. It was story-based lessons from her time at GE and NBC. She discusses the perils of this division. Evidently, per the book, this was been a long time coming.

As a side note, the book is good. I don't want to oversell it but it reminded me of "Creativity, Inc." And while the context is corporate/enterprise, there were plenty of valuable takeaways for any company where people matter and change is a given.

viknod• 6 years ago

GE lighting(for consumers) died a slow death starting with the elimination incandescent bulbs. The twisty florescent were made in China on non-exclusive contract, Walmart and whoever else wanted, bought the exact same bulb. What it did achieve was elimination of a US workforce that was a growing financial burden with retirement and medical benefits. Make no mistake, they architected legislation to eliminate the incandescent. The price of the 60w equivalent CF was four times it's incandescent counterpart, and bulbs that still failed on a regular basis due to power supply design. This was the transformation to a marketing/design company, similar to most companies that put their mark on products today. With no differentiation, or passionate brand loyalty(for light bulbs!?), it's a race to the bottom..

xkapastel• 6 years ago

I'm a little confused, because I'm typing this underneath a GE incandescent bulb, which is also the only type of bulb I use. Has this "elimination" not happened yet?

SisypheanLife• 6 years ago

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_lighting_energ...

The phaseout was defunded.

awakeasleep• 6 years ago

Don't forget the CF bulbs are a low tier of hazardous waste because of the mercury within.

kylek• 6 years ago

That should have been impossible. It was protected. I thought they made it protected.

I'm looking ...

Can they save it? Keep all the pieces together, maybe they can save it.

There's nothing to save. Look for yourself. It's just ... gone. There's nothing left.

analognoise• 6 years ago

https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/livermore-californ...

...what the fuck is this?

ckozlowski• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17776

Just found this now myself. Amazing what you come across in an HN discussion. Fascinating!

iancmceachern• 6 years ago

So GE doesn't make light bulbs, HP doesn't make test equipment, IBM doesn't make computers, and AT&T doesn't have any phone lines. What a strange new world we find ourselves inhabiting.

Aeolun• 6 years ago

But look at all that shareholder value!

madengr• 6 years ago

Back in high school, in 1989, we got a tour of a GE light bulb factory (closed now since 2010 when they outsourced to China). It was interesting as the machinery looked to be early 20th century, but retrofitted as needed with modern PLC. They had 18 parallel lines cranking out bulbs. The automated warehouse was neat. Robotic pallet fetchers controlled by a VAX.

Simulacra2• 6 years ago

After crushing the Incandescent bulb to prop up Theke nascent fluorescent/LED bulb market, Like a Walmart in a small town, they leave and let the rest of us pickup the pieces.

GE switches off light bulb business after almost 130 years

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