I feel like this is such an important lesson in business. It's better to be loved by few and hated by many than to try to please everyone... because everyone has different needs and wants, conventional wisdom says that your target market can't just be "everyone". Even toothbrushes have different price points, colors, and positioning.
As far as I'm concerned, the Jury's still out on whether SpaceX is actually doing anything interesting. I mean, lifting things into orbit at cheaper rates is useful, but there's no evidence of anything game-changing yet.
Let's skip a few steps and assume they've achieved that. That's an important innovation, it changes the economics, will allow SpaceX to drop prices and potentially grow the market substantially.
All of that would be amazing and a huge achievement but it would not push the frontier, it only brings in money that can be used for projects that do that. I would argue that for this reason it's not game-changing, it's incremental progress that enables further innovation that could be game-changing.
Don't get me wrong, what they're doing is hugely impressive and the nerd in me thinks it's amazing. But making a difference in a way that (to go back up the chain) gets people upset? I don't think SpaceX has got close to that.
Getting there is pretty hard too, even if you're in earth orbit.
What about the speed at which they are managing to implement new designs - that seems much better than some of the existing players in that space.
Anyway, according to the theory when the much cheaper but worse technology gains momentum, it gets better and better, until it's serving the high-end needs even better than the original technology and at a lower cost.
Which itself was probably a marketing ploy to try and portray Musk as doing things out of the kindness of his heart.
This summons up most issues:
The genetic fallacy (also known as the fallacy of origins or fallacy of virtue[1]) is a fallacy of irrelevance where a conclusion is suggested based solely on someone's or something's history, origin, or source rather than its current meaning or context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy
Boeing of course been one of the partners in ULA a direct SpaceX competitor[0].
[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N000...
What's sad is that they don't even pretend anymore, it's absolutely and completely blatant and rigged.
The business of "coding" is primarily a defence against the haters. Being outed is now very rarely fatal in the West, but it used to be more dangerous (and is still far more dangerous for trans people). So the LGBT community had to live by an almost steganographic system of linguistic (qv Polari), sartorial and cultural markers.
Boycotts are generally tremendously ineffective
Nestlé still feels the aftershocks of the boycott about its despicable marketing practices of hawking baby formula to mothers unfit to use it in a proper way instead of breastfeeding their kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9_boycott
The boycott started in 1977 and actually did have an effect on how baby formula is marketed nowadays after they initially didn't give much of a shit.
Granted. When you as a company are directly responsible for the death of thousands of infants then a boycott is easier to pull off than when Walt Disney prohibits selfie sticks in its theme parks.
Just one counter example that boycotts can be effective if the circumstances are right.
But that goes exactly against for example what ms is doing. It's making windows for 'everyone' while pissing-off privacy-conscious and freedom-conscious people in the process. Yet it's still at the 'top of the game'.
What am I missing?
Put differently, for any n, it's better that n% of people love you flat out, than everybody loves you n%. But for large enough ns, either is very lucrative.
Subaru n=2, Microsoft n=40, or something like that.
You're probably over-estimating the number of privacy-conscious and freedom-conscious people in the general public, who mainly use Windows, Android and Facebook. Windows is arguably the least privacy-invasive of those. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardenin...
Further, in tables of probably dubious merit (but all we have), Microsoft generally comes out as one of the most admired and most ethical companies. http://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2015/03/09/microsof...
Windows is openly-licensed to OEMs (just sign up on the website) and available at retail. You are free to build your own Windows PC or even start your own PC manufacturing company. Windows source code is available on application ;-)
> Microsoft generally comes out as one of the most admired and most ethical companies http://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2015/03/09/microsof...
https://www.quora.com/How-did-Microsoft-become-the-worlds-mo...
In all seriousness, I'm supposed to believe that someone who has released a system like win10 is ethical? They made their goals clear with this one.
Perhaps they don't spill the oil in the ocean or make dubious financial schemes like those banks, but that's not enough for me, sorry.
> Windows source code is available on application ;-)
Same way intel ME source is probably available somewhere to someone, doesn't mean they shouldn't be burned down to the ground for inventing it.
Well, I use Android, but it basically has no privacy. I ought to be bothered enough to install Cyanogenmod, but I haven't....
> someone who has released a system like win10 is ethical
I don't see why not. It's a mobile operating system and in my opinion the privacy issues have been ridiculously overblown. I don't use Chrome, and I do use Ghostery and uBlock Origin and a few other things, but I have no problems using my Windows 10 set-up with Basic telemetry.
Windows 10 is already being rolled out by the US Defense Department (for the increased security), and almost all global companies are going to move to it in the 2020s.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208%28v=vs....
Software freedom is something that only a minority of the open source people are interested in and that's overall not a large group to begin with.
It's that people don't understand what information is available about them, and what sacrifices they have to make to ensure privacy.
Should they begin to understand that on a large scale, they would then begin to care about privacy.