GE Is Breaking Up with the Light Bulb

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Megalith

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General Electric is getting rid of the light bulb, the most iconic product of GE's 125-year existence. Unveiling GE's roadmap, new CEO John Flannery said that the company would focus on its health, power, and aviation businesses. Lighting didn't make the cut to be part of GE's future.

Thomas Edison invented the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb in 1879. A year later, he founded the Edison Lamp Company and began manufacturing light bulbs for sale. By 1890, Edison had consolidated Edison Lamp with most of his other businesses under Edison General Electric, and in 1892 merged with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form the GE we all know.
 
Pretty sure the light bulb hasn't been that much of a profit center for GE in quite some time. Now with LED bulbs becoming the norm, might as well let some other company do the investing in R&D then buy out the company if it seems feasible.
 
That sucks, I like the GE LED bulbs / light sticks. Guess I need to stock up.

I'm having bad luck the the cheap ones from Depot / Fry's... couple of them are flickering etc. The GE ones have all been solid.
 
Ultima99 said:
No wonder I saw GE LED bulbs on fire sale at $2 for an 8 pack at Sam's. Good thing I grabbed a couple of boxes. Yes that was 25 cents per bulb.
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Man, even incandescents are $1 a bulb.

And I thought I was getting a bargain at $5 for 4 at Wally World

I remember when CFL's came out like $40/bulb.

Then LED's came out for the same price. I was estatic when 40 watts equivs were $10 each.

Now I can get a single bulb for $2 or 4 for $5 @ walmart. Even the efficiency is up. 60 Watt warm white is 9 watts. That used to be 13 Watts on CFL. CFL's are hard to find too (good riddance)
 
DigitalGriffin said:
Man, even incandescents are $1 a bulb.

And I thought I was getting a bargain at $5 for 4 at Wally World

I remember when CFL's came out like $40/bulb.

Then LED's came out for the same price. I was estatic when 40 watts equivs were $10 each.

Now I can get a single bulb for $2 or 4 for $5 @ walmart. Even the efficiency is up. 60 Watt warm white is 9 watts. That used to be 13 Watts on CFL. CFL's are hard to find too (good riddance)
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Yeah I still have a few CFL still hanging around because it really wasn't worth the energy savings to replace a working bulb that is still fairly efficient, but now for a quarter a bulb...
 
"The Light Bulb is dead, long like the Light Bulb..." :(
 
I guess GE...

Puts on sunglasses

Saw the light

Bu-dum, tish

I haven't used a regular light bulb in years. Normally either LED or the CFL type.
 
So, they are going to have to outsource all 1,399 bulbs for the iconic General Electric sign atop Building #5 at the Schenectady NY plant. They don't make lightbulbs there anymore. Has been a turbine plant for years, but it's the original plant
 
The last GE bulbs I bought were Quirky. They were some of the first smart light bulbs, but they were flaky. I saw a note from the last Wink update that it was supposed to have updated the GE Link bulbs. I don't think I am using any at this point - switched over to smart switches instead (made by GE).
 
Phillips hopefully will own this market. Hue is a great product and with economies of scale possibly could come down from the astronomical pricing. But 5 year warranty and should last around a decade... whatever. Love the system. Just set my bedroom (two regular bulbs on opposite sides of the room and light strip under the bed) to relax setting. Wonderful.
 
Honestly, quality LED bulbs are fine with me. Instant on/color saturation, saves money, less heat. I just don't like the bright white. I prefer the warmer colored LED bulbs. They are great!
 
Listened to several of the talking heads on CNBC yesterday while they discussed this plan. Most said the three parts GE is keeping make little sense from a efficiency standpoint. Not much in common between health care, power generation, and aviation. Oddly, most said CEO Flannery is good at turning companies around. GE has discussed selling off the Lighting division in the past. Who knows? The stock has tanked the past 2 days since this plan was announced and the dividend cut. While it may not make a lot of money, having the GE logo easily visible to millions of bulb customers has to be worth something considering the money they spend on advertising their other divisions.
 
I think of GE mainly as an engineering firm, and those three market segments make more sense to be in with that in mind than a commodity product market. Health care, power generation, and aviation are complicated/higher margin (I would assume), having a commodity product for consumer mindshare doesn't really make sense if what you want to focus on is heavy industry and not consumer markets.
 
Does this include their LED bulbs though or just incandescent? If this is true the only big player would be Sylvania and to a small degree Phillips.
This lack of competition will raise the price.

Pretty sure GE makes the walmart [great value] bulbs for them and I have noticed the price has gone up about 20% in the past few months.
I replaced all my bulbs with GV when they were cheap and so far no duds and they should last the next 10 years.
 
GE has been nothing more than a placeholder name in consumer space for a long time. They have been relabeling other companies LED products and or licensing out their name for many years now. My GE undercounter lights? Proudly say GE everywhere on the product. In the tiniest of font reads manufactured by JASCO lighting. They have been doing this on most of their consumer electronic products as well. Their dehumidifiers have been complete relabels. Their nightlights and other household trinkets look incredibly similar to chinese variants on ebay and amazon. When the genuine ge product is inspected at the store, it lists nothing more than a CE mark for certification.

GE has been repackaging their fridges, microwaves and dishwashers for years as well. They could have originally designed these products, so I'll cut them some slack there. But I've noticed in the 20yr product range of GE appliances that I've owned, that they use the same PCB designs from product to product. My '97 arctica fridge? Uses the same PCB as my '08 ge profile. The difference? One Revision in the PCB, so they could use smaller footprint relays. My dishwasher? The same situation. My air conditioner? YUP. It's the exact same product year to year, just different exterior moldings.

The GE CEO recently pulled out of consumer household appliances and sold them off to Haier because it didn't fit into what he envisions GE will be doing in the future. I believe it is simply because GE did not want to pay the R&D to actually design new products, and they don't think they can get another 20 years out of the same poorly designed products. So they sold the right to use their name so they can milk as much as possible from Haier.

In terms of LED bulbs, I'm not going to miss GE, because frankly, I never think they really innovated much in that space. Philips and Sylvania have innovated a lot more, and that shows in their wider range of LED products produced over the past few years. Philips was one of the first companies to take LEDs seriously, and was the solo entrant in the US Department of Energy L-Prize competition. GE decided to not compete.
It is getting kinda scary that GE, Philips, and sylvania have all sold off their LED divisions to chinese companies. I believe that they were tired of the race-to-the-bottom effect and saw little profits when competing with shenzen hole in the wall outfits. I have noticed that a lot of recently produced LED bulbs are very poorly made. Most do not have thermal potting compound and are very noisy. Most of the ecosmart bulbs I've tried also produce unwanted banding in video footage shot near them. Some of the inexpensive philips LED bulbs are very electrically noisy and impact the measurements on my test equipment as well. My older LEDs didn't seem to have such noisy designs.
 
The replaceable bulb itself is dying slowly. The trend is heading more to all in one. Led and the fixture being built around each other and the role the light is for.
 
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commissioneranthony said:
GE has been nothing more than a placeholder name in consumer space for a long time. They have been relabeling other companies LED products and or licensing out their name for many years now. My GE undercounter lights? Proudly say GE everywhere on the product. In the tiniest of font reads manufactured by JASCO lighting. They have been doing this on most of their consumer electronic products as well. Their dehumidifiers have been complete relabels. Their nightlights and other household trinkets look incredibly similar to chinese variants on ebay and amazon. When the genuine ge product is inspected at the store, it lists nothing more than a CE mark for certification.

GE has been repackaging their fridges, microwaves and dishwashers for years as well. They could have originally designed these products, so I'll cut them some slack there. But I've noticed in the 20yr product range of GE appliances that I've owned, that they use the same PCB designs from product to product. My '97 arctica fridge? Uses the same PCB as my '08 ge profile. The difference? One Revision in the PCB, so they could use smaller footprint relays. My dishwasher? The same situation. My air conditioner? YUP. It's the exact same product year to year, just different exterior moldings.

The GE CEO recently pulled out of consumer household appliances and sold them off to Haier because it didn't fit into what he envisions GE will be doing in the future. I believe it is simply because GE did not want to pay the R&D to actually design new products, and they don't think they can get another 20 years out of the same poorly designed products. So they sold the right to use their name so they can milk as much as possible from Haier.

In terms of LED bulbs, I'm not going to miss GE, because frankly, I never think they really innovated much in that space. Philips and Sylvania have innovated a lot more, and that shows in their wider range of LED products produced over the past few years. Philips was one of the first companies to take LEDs seriously, and was the solo entrant in the US Department of Energy L-Prize competition. GE decided to not compete.
It is getting kinda scary that GE, Philips, and sylvania have all sold off their LED divisions to chinese companies. I believe that they were tired of the race-to-the-bottom effect and saw little profits when competing with shenzen hole in the wall outfits. I have noticed that a lot of recently produced LED bulbs are very poorly made. Most do not have thermal potting compound and are very noisy. Most of the ecosmart bulbs I've tried also produce unwanted banding in video footage shot near them. Some of the inexpensive philips LED bulbs are very electrically noisy and impact the measurements on my test equipment as well. My older LEDs didn't seem to have such noisy designs.
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You're being unnecessarily harsh on GE. When you are talking consumer space, GE has to compete with Chinese companies. As such they have to trim the fat whenever possible.

And if you knew ANYTHING about large scale company R&D, they RARELY redo anything from the ground up. Yes it's revisions. Why? Because it's cost effective. And if it gets the job done, does it need a completely new R&D & Retool? If they redid everything, they would have to work out a whole new series of bugs.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
You're being unnecessarily harsh on GE. When you are talking consumer space, GE has to compete with Chinese companies. As such they have to trim the fat whenever possible.

And if you knew ANYTHING about large scale company R&D, they RARELY redo anything from the ground up. Yes it's revisions. Why? Because it's cost effective. And if it gets the job done, does it need a completely new R&D & Retool? If they redid everything, they would have to work out a whole new series of bugs.
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Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh on GE, but It gets a little old fixing their failure prone appliances month after month. I'm sure other companies in the appliance space follow similar manufacturing practices. I just find it humorous how meager their revisions are. The most change I've seen in any of their control pcbs were a shift from through hole to Quad flat package. That in itself makes sense because they can forgo the hassles of soldering both sides in a through hole design. Instead of wave soldering + flip board + hand soldering, they can just use a pick and place machine, which saves on assembly time.
 
didn't GE sell LED bulbs as well?...I'm surprised they would leave that business...seems like something that would always be profitable
 
Zohar78 said:
The replaceable bulb itself is dying slowly. The trend is heading more to all in one. Led and the fixture being built around each other and the role the light is for.
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This.
And that was exactly what I was designing 6 years ago.
Up to 160lm/W, 90+ CRI, barely above room temp, ~200k hours+. But people don't want to pay for it.
LED tech has barely improved since, we are pretty much at blackbody radiation limits.

China mostly makes shitheaps without heatsinking that last similar to CFL, because that's all you cheap fuckers want to pay for. You could've had LEDs built into the building that never needed replacement in your lifetime and were even more efficient. 6 years ago. Too bad!
 
I picked up about 80 incandescents like 9 years ago due to the scare of them being replaced by the Dairy Queen version which are horrible. I now use led bulbs for everything except my overhead table lamp on my desk which led light even with the kelvin is kinda harsh even at 9 watt or 40 watt substitute.

If you run about 20 bulbs in the house I would totally recommend buying like X5 packs of them and never have to worry about it again for the next 13 years or so and watch the energy bill go down a few dollars.
 
N4CR said:
This.
And that was exactly what I was designing 6 years ago.
Up to 160lm/W, 90+ CRI, barely above room temp, ~200k hours+. But people don't want to pay for it.
LED tech has barely improved since, we are pretty much at blackbody radiation limits.

China mostly makes shitheaps without heatsinking that last similar to CFL, because that's all you cheap fuckers want to pay for. You could've had LEDs built into the building that never needed replacement in your lifetime and were even more efficient. 6 years ago. Too bad!
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200,000 hours would have been pretty f'n impressive. Assuming you had phosphors that lasted that long, and a Pn junction on the diode that didn't suffer from electron decay. Obviously this wasn't UV stokes shift light as that drops efficiency. Maybe multiple source frequencies?
 
GE should have gotten into the car headlight business.

Those fancy new LED headlights on cars are uber expensive to replace. The reason being is they have to replace the entire headlamp assembly, not just one or two slide out bulbs. I was given a quote of $700 for one! Bend me over! And I thought my $700 mirror on my Taurus was bad.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
200,000 hours would have been pretty f'n impressive. Assuming you had phosphors that lasted that long, and a Pn junction on the diode that didn't suffer from electron decay. Obviously this wasn't UV stokes shift light as that drops efficiency. Maybe multiple source frequencies?
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You're on the right track but yes this is possible with typical 445nm stokes conversion on relatively common high end LEDs then and a few optical tricks which are only just being employed now.. even then you can get 4-8% on current top end designs with modification... But real secret - it's simply what happens when you run high end LEDs at 30% of their rated current, with enough heatsink area and thermal conductivity to keep the junction temperature 30-40C° or less. Even very high temperature junction testing (more than double Tj of my design) for 25khrs from one manufacturer, showed lower degradation than predicted ~5%.. degradation with the above approach is almost unmreasurable. So far have real world use ~50khr+ on designs of this nature with 0 failures too. Will do long term output measurements in coming year and see if the degradation is beyond a few %. Thing is you can always bump the current up a few percent to cover for this without any major change in longevity.. its the sweet spot really. Catch is you end up using 2-3x the amount leds, hence the price..

You can get approx 98CRI on custom phosphor runs with remote phosphor and similar with traditional designs. Remote phosphor can't be beaten for light quality.
To be honest the only thing I couldn't rate for 200k hr is the PSU. Caps would dry out before you reach that, but the fitting should do that or exceed it.

Tired AF, sorry for grammar (FF being a cock with spellcheck too).
 
DigitalGriffin said:
GE should have gotten into the car headlight business.

Those fancy new LED headlights on cars are uber expensive to replace. The reason being is they have to replace the entire headlamp assembly, not just one or two slide out bulbs. I was given a quote of $700 for one! Bend me over! And I thought my $700 mirror on my Taurus was bad.
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I’d guess that is mostly profit margin since you need to buy the OEM part. I’ve seen things I’ve designed with almost 10x markup as replacement parts.
 
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