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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Amusingly enough, until Tesla was successful, HN was all ablaze with why they shouldn't try new things. Tesla should just hire all the experts from Ford et. al. and do the same thing as everyone else, except electric. In fact, they were going to fail because they didn't understand "automotive grade". Touchscreens? Psh, guaranteed product failure.

SpaceX was going to fail because they didn't use conventional wisdom building their stuff. They used Electron for their UI (my god! guaranteed product failure! astronauts will hate them!). Their stuff exploded when they tried it out. Classic, should've done what ULA did. ULA are the experts.

"They don't listen". That was always the theme. They don't listen. That's why they win.

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I don’t remember hearing those complaints about SpaceX. Nobody has anything good to say about ULA — it’s a joint venture of defense contractors.

Tesla makes a lot of stupid choices and are an example of survivorship bias in many ways. They make opinionated products and Musk has the instinct to play chicken and attract investors to keep the thing alive.

Fortunately, we can search:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19905701

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20446963 (Boeing is part of ULA)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22095120 (Claims that SpaceX is treated better than Boeing)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22096380 (I've seen more accidents from SpaceX than launches from Boeing)

To be clear, I just searched "site:news.ycombinator.com spacex boeing" and grabbed the first few I could. Took me 5 minutes.

It probably isn't too far to go to find comments about how ULA hasn't had a single explosion or some such thing.

>>That was always the theme. They don't listen. That's why they win.

You forget about tons of startup and business that failed spectacularly because they think they know better than those "old fools" (also, they usually comes up with arrogant attitude to change the world for some reason)

Tesla is one of a very very few outlier. I have to give them credit for that.

Edit: To clarify things up. I didn't mean that old way is always better, some people I've work with are just too stubborn with their old-school thinking and led to lack of innovation to the point of annoying. But I'm also sure that there are also good old wisdom in different perspective that younger generation can learn from, and not just discard it completely.

I don't think anyone forgot about them. It's just... that's how innovation happens. Most big, established companies you see were once young upstarts who arrogantly thought they knew better than everyone else how to run a business.

No, no one forgot those guys. It's a necessary but not sufficient condition if you want to make a highly disruptive startup. You don't win by repeating the status quo. But you can most definitely lose by not repeating the status quo.

That I wholeheartedly agreed. I just felt that some people just discard the old way completely, seeing it as outdated(which is true in certain aspect) I personally think that there are always old wisdom that younger business owner can revisit, to learn from.

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