There is a neat feature in iTunes that prevents the "waste of overproduction," if you will, in the Lean vernacular. Overproduction is the waste of building more than your customer needs (as evidenced by automakers having to slash inventory levels after building products that people don't want).  Here are some earlier posts on "overproduction."

Toyota does a much better job of reducing and preventing overproduction, compared to the rest of the industry.  Their goal is to produce just "one less" than customer demand.  Toyota isn't tempted to stuff product onto dealer lots, as Chrysler has done, or sell cars to rental fleets to maintain volume, as GM, Ford, and Chrysler have all done to some extent.

iTunes senses that you haven't listened to certain podcasts and quits downloading new episodes. This saves their server bandwidth, and costs, I suppose. If you have a podcast with an exclamation point icon, if you click on it you get the pop up window that's pictured here. You can say, "yes, please start downloading these again" to overrule the bandwidth saving feature.

Seems to illustrate that Lean concept quite nicely -- prevent overproduction, but give your customer control to get what they need.

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