Your arguments notwithstanding, the fact that the Phoebus Cartel essentially operated in secrecy implies that there was more to this than just optimizing (standardizing) incandescent light bulbs to 1000 hours.

True, one has always been able to buy long life incandescent light bulbs and I've done so myself to use in certain industrial situations. However, I'd contend that that has little or nothing to do with planned obsolescence.

Moreover, there's more than a whiff of the Phoebus Cartel still about today with light bulb manufacture. Let me give you an example: when compact fluorescent bulbs first came out some four decades ago, I installed many of them. The principal brands I bought were Philips and Wotan and the majority of them lasted well in excess of 10,000 hours. I recall losing track of the life of one low power bulb of ≈8 watts after it had passed 50,000 hours operation (that is, after having being in service for over 25 years and used between 4 and 5 hours per day over this time, eventually it was replaced not because it had failed but rather to replace it with a bulb of higher wattage).

Take the current situation: almost every compact fluorescent that I've bought in the last 10 or so years has only lasted about 1000 hours despite the fact that the packets they came in usually advertised their life to be a nominal 8,000 hours or so. The fact is that none of them ever reached anywhere near these published figures. To make matters worse, often these bulbs would break (usually around the base) and sometimes the coiled glass would fall to the floor (no doubt dispensing its small amount of Hg everywhere in the process).

Moreover, a while back, so called 'green' environmentally friendly compact fluorescent bulbs were all the rage. They were advertised as having less mercury and thus more environmentally sound. What a joke that turned out to be. All the Greenies loved them because they contained less mercury. Unfortunately, most never knew how the bulbs worked anyway and thus they never realized that reducing their mercury levels below a certain concentration would dramatically reduce the bulb's life to such an extent that the overall result was a net loss for the environment. Right, environmentally friendly bulbs actually had an even shorter service life (hence, Watt for Watt, they produced much more environmental e-waste over the long run)!

Clearly, all manufacturers were disingenuous by not stating the consequences of lowering the mercury levels in compact fluorescent bulbs. They deliberately played on the fact that consumers weren't cognizant of the facts, thus the lowering of manufacturing standards was a win for them as there were few complaints. Manufacturers not only made savings by including less mercury but also other manufacturing standards were lowered such as using lower grade capacitors and the maximum working voltages on capacitors and semiconductors were reduced to much closer (lower) tolerances which made these bulbs much more prone to failure from over-voltage spikes, etc.

In the end, many more bulbs were consumed than there should have been. Concomitantly, we've ended up with even bigger piles of electronics waste—and the net amount of mercury used was actually higher than it would have been if the bulbs had been designed to have a service life of >10,000 hours (as had been the case some 20 years earlier). Incidentally, the same unacceptable logic is now being applied in the manufacture of normal fluorescent lights† in that current tubes have a much, much shorter lifespan than those made 50 or so years ago).

Yep, it wasn't kosher to go around advertising the fact that 'our bulbs have a little more mercury but they will last you many times longer'. Right, manufacturers must have been laughing themselves sick over the fact that they could double-dip their profits by playing on the fact of the public's current, almost irrational, phobia over Element 80 and that reducing the amount of it in bulbs automatically led to vastly increased bulb sales. Moreover, they gloated even more when some governments made compact florescent bulbs mandatory but did not also introduce mandatory manufacturing standards to ensure their long operational life.

The overall net effect being bulb manufacturers scoring two wins whilst consumers and the environment both scored nil. Right, the incarnation of the Phoebus Cartel is alive and well.

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† Several years ago, I was involved in relocating a factory and the old site used T12-type fluorescent tubes the majority of which were made by Crompton Parkinson and were over 50 years old and still in good working condition!

We decided not to relocate those old lights and we replace them with new T8-type fluorescents of Eastern manufacture at the new site. These new tubes are now already starting to fail. The lifespan difference between the old and new types is so startling that I reckon it ought to be part of a study into changes into manufacturing techniques. These new tubes have to represent one of the most quintessential examples of planned obsolescence ever. Frankly, it's absolutely outrageous that this can happen.