Before the Industrial Revolution, people didn't care too much if a tool was new or old, as long as it worked, Farman said. After Ford released its Model T in 1908, it maintained the same general design and black color for nearly two decades of production. But General Motors began introducing annual revisions in the 1920s, with new colors and design tweaks as a means of differentiation and it changed how consumers viewed products beyond absolute utility and as something iterative.