I go to car shows and see gorgeous cars from the '30s, '40s and '50s that work as well today as they did then. When I used cars as an analogy, I didn't say I was against improving them. Planned obsolescence isn't built into cars.
Nor is it built into many things that are accused of it. In fact, planned obsolescence really doesn't make financial sense in that if a manufacturer makes a product specifically designed to be useless after a certain period of time, people will stop buying it. In the automotive arena, it used to be that car manufacturers made a great show of the new model for each year, immediately making last year's model "obsolete" by design. But along came the Japanese and Germans, with reliable cars that didn't change from year to year so it was hard to know that yours was three years old whereas your neighbor's was just one year old. And their cars worked better, got better gas mileage and didn't require servicing as much. That technology change forced the American manufacturers to change from the "model year" approach to be more like their competition because people stopped buying planned obsolescence.
All those old cars that "work as well today as they did then" cannot pass modern safety inspections, so they have to be granted exemptions by their "antique" status. So while a 1928 Whippet that a friend of mine owns may very well run "as well as it did then," he won't take it on an Interstate highway because it cannot get up to the minimum safe speed for that road. And it wouldn't be safe even if it could get up to that speed. And if he has an accident in that Whippet, he is much more likely to be seriously injured because it's missing safety features that we take for granted now. In a similar fashion, older operating systems and applications lack the security features that are needed on the "Interstate" internet of the 21st century. Banks and financial institutions are increasingly (and appropriately) worried about internet financial transactions, to the point where some institutions simply won't allow older browsers access to their systems. Much like the Whippet, those old browsers work "as well today as they did then" but that simply isn't acceptable today.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Computer hardware and software developers make some great changes that actually improve their products. Many other changes actually make the products harder and less convenient to use.
That was probably a line used by buggy whip manufacturers when Henry Ford rolled out the original Model A. With a nice horse and buggy you don't need gasoline, don't have to crank to start it and a horse doesn't need tuning up every so often. Why change?
Seriously, what you may think is "harder and less convenient" is to other people the greatly appreciated addition of a function or feature that they need. So beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But just because technology moves on and a product becomes obsolete doesn't mean that it was planned. Change happens. We either get along with it or get left behind. I'm not saying that every change is good, or beneficial to all. I personally don't like the new interface in Word because I have to learn all new ways to get things done, but if I want to use Word, I learn to use it the way it's designed. MS isn't going to change back because I don't like it. Maybe if people stop buying Word, they might consider, but for now, that ain't happening. If Word becomes simply too hard for me to bother with it, I'll shift to something else and then have to figure out how to be compatible with everybody who sticks with Word. Frankly, it's easier for me to learn a new trick in my old age than to try to figure out how to get other people to accept my Pages documents (yes, yes, I know Pages can save as Word, but sometimes it changes things when you do that).
Finally, I have no idea what Zuckerberg has to do with this conversation. Maybe I missed the reference, but frankly I don't care what Zuckerberg believes. He's an idiot. A rich idiot, but an idiot, nevertheless.