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Musk is just all about appeal to novelty. Real solutions are expensive, boring and require rich people to be slightly less rich, fancy toys with silly names let them pretend they're contributing to society.
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Jul 23, 2017 16:45
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silence_kit posted:Well according to the Horseshoe theory metric of (potentially) successful companies, Amazon has had many quarters where it was not profitable, therefore it had no hopes of ever becoming a successful company. To be the next Amazon is actually, contrary to common belief outside of this thread, to be the next major failed company. Nah - Amazon invested money into their business which created GAAP losses but was actually growing their market share whereas Tesla blows money on crazy poo poo because Elon Musk is a poor man's Hank Scorpio. My favorite company that showed GAAP and taxable income for years but still went bust was Steve and Barrys, which was only profitable because of anchor fee income that they reported as ordinary business income (that stopped during the GFC and they promptly went out of business).
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Jul 23, 2017 16:49
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There's a lot of Hank Scorpios in the top bits of business, it's based upon the Simpsons writers (who were like 90% Harvard grads) recollections of the kids who wanted to go into business from their school
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Jul 23, 2017 16:55
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curufinor posted:There's a lot of Hank Scorpios in the top bits of business, it's based upon the Simpsons writers (who were like 90% Harvard grads) recollections of the kids who wanted to go into business from their school Simpsons writing is more elitest than nearly any other domain of human endeavor You can look at the quality of Simpsons writing and think about the concomitant quality of our drat elites nowadays
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Jul 23, 2017 16:56
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curufinor posted:There's a lot of Hank Scorpios in the top bits of business, it's based upon the Simpsons writers (who were like 90% Harvard grads) recollections of the kids who wanted to go into business from their school Except that Scorpio at least made money through his super villain business (i.e, extortion) whereas Musk has yet to even do that.
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Jul 23, 2017 16:57
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Horseshoe theory posted:Except that Scorpio at least made money through his super villain business (i.e, extortion) whereas Musk has yet to even do that. Man exited successfully from PayPal, which is also an extortion business Don't see any differences
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Jul 23, 2017 17:00
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curufinor posted:Man exited successfully from PayPal, which is also an extortion business Nah, that was Thiel's handiwork.
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Jul 23, 2017 17:02
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Horseshoe theory posted:Nah, that was Thiel's handiwork. Guy owned more than the vampire tho
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Jul 23, 2017 17:06
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curufinor posted:You can look at the quality of Simpsons writing and think about the concomitant quality of our drat elites nowadays cromulent?
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Jul 23, 2017 17:06
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silence_kit posted:cromulent? Have you loving watched the Simpsons lately
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Jul 23, 2017 17:08
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Scorpio was an incredible boss. Well, his entire gimmick was that he's a Bond villain whose personal quirk happens to be treating his employees well. For that matter, Homer is shockingly effective middle management, if only because he doesn't try to mess with people who seem to know what they're doing, and focuses on keeping them happy. They did have briefly recurring Artie Ziff representing the last tech bubble and the kind of people that make money off of them.
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Jul 23, 2017 17:08
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curufinor posted:Simpsons writing is more elitest than nearly any other domain of human endeavor This is actually true. https://twitter.com/solmaquina/status/878252029960966146
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Jul 23, 2017 17:26
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curufinor posted:Simpsons writing is more elitest than nearly any other domain of human endeavor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlRV6yxZUSQ
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Jul 23, 2017 17:40
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Klyith posted:That's their stated intention, they're just doing it in a very dumb way. Uber is basically Groupon, they have a simple legit business model that's absurdly overhyped and mismanaged but could (and probably will) survive after a crashing back down to earth because, again, summoning cars with an app is a legit if not world changing business model. Tesla is a legit accomplishment and downplaying a car startup (incredibly hard) that created the first good electric car that the mainstream talks about is dumb and only done by people who don't have a coherent understanding of what innovation is.
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Jul 23, 2017 19:00
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asdf32 posted:Uber is basically Groupon, they have a simple legit business model that's absurdly overhyped and mismanaged but could (and probably will) survive after a crashing back down to earth because, again, summoning cars with an app is a legit if not world changing business model. Ride hailing capability is commodity software at this point. quote:Tesla is a legit accomplishment and downplaying a car startup (incredibly hard) that created the first good electric car that the mainstream talks about is dumb and only done by people who don't have a coherent understanding of what innovation is. What exactly was innovative about Tesla at the start, aside for capitalizing on personal brand making?
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Jul 23, 2017 19:15
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archangelwar posted:What exactly was innovative about Tesla at the start, aside for capitalizing on personal brand making? I can't think of another luxury electric vehicle that existed at the time. Whether you think that's innovative or not is up to you, but it was an untapped market to make electric vehicles cool.
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Jul 23, 2017 19:25
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silence_kit posted:Well according to the Horseshoe theory metric of (potentially) successful companies, Amazon has had many quarters where it was not profitable, therefore it had no hopes of ever becoming a successful company. To be the next Amazon is actually, contrary to common belief outside of this thread, to be the next major failed company. Amazon was the first company to ever truly prove that online retailing as a business model had the potential we today know it has. They changed the face of retailing and later did the same in cloud computing. Meanwhile, Tesla is an unprofitable luxury car manufacturer in a sea of car manufacturing competition with nothing innovative to offer to even remotely have a a chance of knocking off market leaders. To use the most relevant buzzword humanely possible, there was nothing disruptive about what Elon Musk has done with Tesla.
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Jul 23, 2017 19:26
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Shooting Blanks posted:I can't think of another luxury electric vehicle that existed at the time. Whether you think that's innovative or not is up to you, but it was an untapped market to make electric vehicles cool. Yeah, it's pretty much this. So many people don't know about/forgot about the Tesla Roadster (electric Lotus Elise), which was not only completely unique at the time but was also setting EV-distance records. While they may not have invented any of the core technologies, they were the first to put them together into a very nicely working package that was also fun to drive.
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Jul 23, 2017 19:33
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Motronic posted:Yeah, it's pretty much this. So many people don't know about/forgot about the Tesla Roadster (electric Lotus Elise), which was not only completely unique at the time but was also setting EV-distance records. While they may not have invented any of the core technologies, they were the first to put them together into a very nicely working package that was also fun to drive. You can change out the engine how much you want, it's still just a low-volume luxury car. The car that got Tesla buzzing was the Model S and even with Norway putting absurd numbers of state subsidies on the car (driving sales through the roof) Tesla could still not seize upon the momentum and actually get anywhere with it. We're still waiting around for someone to actually popularize the electrical car, because it has yet to happen.
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Jul 23, 2017 19:43
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Model S also has obscene torque and can outgun most supercars. Seems pretty innovative to me.
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Jul 23, 2017 19:45
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pokie posted:Model S also has obscene torque and can outgun most supercars. Seems pretty innovative to me. Again, business as usual when it comes to luxury sport cars. When we are talking about innovation in the context of startups incremental innovation is not enough. To be 'disruptive' something has to be revolutionary and have mass market adoption, it can't just be a slight variation on something that already exist which barely anyone uses.
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Jul 23, 2017 19:48
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Shooting Blanks posted:I can't think of another luxury electric vehicle that existed at the time. Whether you think that's innovative or not is up to you, but it was an untapped market to make electric vehicles cool. Just because you cannot think of any doesn't mean they didn't exist. The issue was timing as poor battery performance and lack of range suppressed any pent up demand and pushed larger manufacturers subject to traditional economic factors from attempting more than a token push into the market. Tesla hit upon the right timing, where lithium-ion performance coupled with resurgence of tech bubble economics and brand-making which allowed for reach into a potentially shy market, and leveraged it to start-up style success. The roadster itself was just a frankenstein of parts from other car manufacturers, with a slick new coating of marketing and freedom to eschew traditional economic success indicators. I will certainly grant that leveraging timing to such a degree requires some positive effort on behalf of the company and I am grateful for its position as market catalyst.
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Jul 23, 2017 19:51
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MiddleOne posted:Again, business as usual when it comes to luxury sport cars. When we are talking about innovation in the context of startups incremental innovation is not enough. To be 'disruptive' something has to be revolutionary and have mass market adoption, it can't just be a slight variation on something that already exist which barely anyone uses. Really? It's like 2-4 times cheaper than competitors.
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Jul 23, 2017 19:54
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pokie posted:Model S also has obscene torque and can outgun most supercars. Seems pretty innovative to me. But did Tesla invent torque?
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Jul 23, 2017 19:55
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MiddleOne posted:Again, business as usual when it comes to luxury sport cars. When we are talking about innovation in the context of startups incremental innovation is not enough. To be 'disruptive' something has to be revolutionary and have mass market adoption, it can't just be a slight variation on something that already exist which barely anyone uses. Name a real innovation for us please.
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Jul 23, 2017 19:57
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asdf32 posted:Name a real innovation for us please. Not being an incremental improvement on something that already exists, preferably by popularising a new field of products or services in the process. Apple did not invent the MP3 player and while the Ipod was succesful it was hardly more than an incremental improvement. Compare that to the iPhone, which innovated smartphones from niche product into mass-market. The Tesla Model S was undeniably innovative, the question if it was relevantly innovative, which I argue it was not. MiddleOne fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Jul 23, 2017 |
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Jul 23, 2017 20:01
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MiddleOne posted:Not being an incremental improvement on something that already exists. The Tesla Model S was undeniably innovative, the question if it was relevantly innovative, which I argue it was not. And what's an example of something that's not incremental?
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Jul 23, 2017 20:03
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MiddleOne posted:The car that got Tesla buzzing was the Model S and even with Norway putting absurd numbers of state subsidies on the car (driving sales through the roof) Tesla could still not seize upon the momentum and actually get anywhere with it. We're still waiting around for someone to actually popularize the electrical car, because it has yet to happen. I don't mean to be all USA chauvinist on you, but Norway does not matter to the fortunes of Tesla, or any other non-Norwegian company. You probably shouldn't extrapolate your local results to judge that they're gonna fail. In the US they sell every car they can make and their main problem is that they're always falling short on production, followed distantly by labor practices that they really should fix. For one thing, maybe if labor was happier they'd be more productive! asdf32 posted:Tesla is a legit accomplishment and downplaying a car startup (incredibly hard) that created the first good electric car that the mainstream talks about is dumb and only done by people who don't have a coherent understanding of what innovation is. I don't care what people think about innovation, which is pretty subjective in a lot of cases. I'd just like them to have a coherent understanding of capitalism. The guy saying that the irrational exuberance over Tesla's stock is keeping them afloat for example.
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Jul 23, 2017 20:10
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asdf32 posted:And what's an example of something that's not incremental? Something that actually changes the market. The internet did not look the same before Google's search engine showed that searching could be non poo poo. Cloud computing was not a mass industry before Amazon perfected it and made centralized server-hosting seem overly complicated. No one loving thought they wanted a slightly larger smartphone for home use before some idiot at Apple thought up the iPad. Tesla and Space X is not Paypal is what I'm saying.
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Jul 23, 2017 20:10
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asdf32 posted:And what's an example of something that's not incremental? Not incremental?
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Jul 23, 2017 20:11
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MiddleOne posted:Something that actually changes the market. The internet did not look the same before Google's search engine showed that searching could be non poo poo. Cloud computing was not a mass industry before Amazon perfected it and made centralized server-hosting seem overly complicated. No one loving thought they wanted a slightly larger smartphone for home use before some idiot at Apple thought up the iPad. they may get their face smashed in, but if they get their face smashed in it'll be by all the established companies giddying up and making a decent electric car by copying the gently caress out of some of tesla's ideas
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Jul 23, 2017 20:13
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MiddleOne posted:Something that actually changes the market. SpaceX hasn't changed the market for space launch. Ooooookay. You see, MiddleOne hasn't taken a ride on a rocket, and teslas aren't popular in Norway. Not innovative! But he does have an iphone and an ipad. That's innovation!
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Jul 23, 2017 20:17
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MiddleOne posted:Something that actually changes the market. The internet did not look the same before Google's search engine showed that searching could be non poo poo.\ If you know the first thing about the Internet from that time (like, you were around to use it) this is the definition of incremental. Search arguably started with Gopher, but pick your starting point. It was largely hand indexed. Then came along the next wave of search engines with hand indexing plus submissions. Then web crawling. It all kinda still sucked, but then Google took all of that an come up with a better algorithm for ranking crawled results and displaying them. MiddleOne posted:Cloud computing was not a mass industry before Amazon perfected it If there was something to perfect it was by definition an incremental improvement.
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Jul 23, 2017 20:19
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MiddleOne posted:Something that actually changes the market. The internet did not look the same before Google's search engine showed that searching could be non poo poo. Cloud computing was not a mass industry before Amazon perfected it and made centralized server-hosting seem overly complicated. No one loving thought they wanted a slightly larger smartphone for home use before some idiot at Apple thought up the iPad. Well this is done and drat I still have a bunch of time to kill.
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Jul 23, 2017 20:20
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Lol that people in this thread are arguing that human advancement isn't always incremental. Everything is born out of the context from which it came; the collective knowledge of that context. There are no original ideas that spring forth from either the vacuum or from the mind of some libertarian technologist.
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Jul 23, 2017 20:35
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I sometimes wonder whether the mass market will even matter in 10 or so more years when nobody but the 0.00001% has any money left.
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Jul 23, 2017 20:37
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MiddleOne posted:To use the most relevant buzzword humanely possible, there was nothing disruptive about what Elon Musk has done with Tesla. In the academic sense of the word, this is spot on. Tesla is not serving an ignored low end market segment in a fundamentally new way. It's a luxury product.
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Jul 23, 2017 20:49
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BrandorKP posted:In the academic sense of the word, this is spot on. Tesla is not serving an ignored low end market segment in a fundamentally new way. It's a luxury product. I'm far from a Musk fanboy even though in the context of some of the posters here I'll probably be accused of it: he said early on he wanted to bring this down market, and drat if they aren't. $110k, roadster to a $68k model S ($82k Model X) to a $35k Model 3. You might say that's......incremental.
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Jul 23, 2017 21:20
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Klyith posted:SpaceX hasn't changed the market for space launch. Ooooookay. BrandorKP posted:In the academic sense of the word, this is spot on. Tesla is not serving an ignored low end market segment in a fundamentally new way. It's a luxury product.
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Jul 23, 2017 21:30
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Cicero posted:So it's literally impossible to disrupt a luxury market with a different kind of luxury good? That's a dumb definition. I'll see if I can find the for you tonight (I'm PST so it'll be late) I think I had a link to the HBR paper where the term was coined in my MIS notes. But yeah what Musk is doing is just normal competition by a business for a high margin luxury market. It's not disuption.
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Jul 23, 2017 21:38
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