In certain industries life cycle requirements are common (e.g. our customers expect 15 to 20 years of product lifetime) but it is far from universal and isn't enforced by a EU wide law AFAIK.
Yep - if you’re a business wanting to buy a million dollar machine to do whatever, you want some assurance that it can be repaired and will be working until replacement time (at least the depreciation schedule, often many MANY years longer).
Physical things have interesting support - there are actually companies whose entire business model is support equipment from companies that have been gone 40+ years.
Right. My little cottage industry/side gig used to build electronic boards that were used to interface 40+ year old machine tools to modern controls when the original controllers broke and replacements weren't available. I sold to a small company that did nothing but retrofits like that.
Really wish I could find more niches like this. It's a boring but profitable domain to get into.
Yup. At my last job, we designed our products (medical instruments) for a service life of 15 years and a market lifetime of 25. i.e., from the time the product was released to the market, you could expect Service and Support and spare parts to be available for at least 25 years and the device itself was expected to last 15 years in the field.
Of course, I'm talking about large machines that cost between $500k - $1M each, so...
