Is Theranos using existing technologies and still not providing value above the incumbents? This is what I really want to know. I just don't know.
If Theranos is not using their fingerprick blood testing technology, then they are not using their technology commercially at all. So if this is true, then they're a company that's been in business 11 years, has a massive valuation, and has not developed a commercially viable technology yet. It's as if a web search company like Google had been around 11 years, was worth >$1 billion, and then was found to be exclusively using and rebranding Microsoft's search technology instead. It's a scandal.
Theranos' valuation cannot be sustained anywhere near its current value simply by selling blood tests conducted on equipment manufactured by other firms. Theranos' claim to fame is a breakthrough in fingertip-prick blood testing technology, and they have no way to differentiate themselves in the market without this breakthrough technology - their investment value cannot be sustained simply by reselling technology made by other firms.
A better comparison would be if Uber had claimed they had self-driving car before they'd even entered the market, had started doing rides, and then it turned out Lyft drivers were surreptitiously hidden inside the front of the car and were actually driving instead of the mystical self-driving computer.
That's how it looks at the moment with the way Theranos is behaving.
Theranos, the company, has claimed to be building an amazing new testing system. They're not just about getting blood test centers set up in grocery stores, they're very specifically all about a new technology that gives consumers access to a lot of tests all at once, from a pin-prick blood sample. Not an old-style blood sample from a vein, and not this piecemeal "we mostly use the current equipment, but then we can also use our own" weirdness.
The business was "fancy new tech, disrupting health care," not "we'll take blood from your vein in a grocery store".
If you're going to try and say, well, ok, but maybe they're just pivoting to using standard equipment but now it's in a grocery store, I guess you could say that...