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Comment by tomatotomato37 | Hacker News Reader

How on earth do you mismanage a company so badly that you can literally give sight to the blind and still go bankrupt? Even at a $500k treatment there should be more than enough aging millionaires willing to buy their way out of their own body's infallibilities

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They can't really give sight to the blind - from the article: Normal vision, this is not. Patients and doctors alike stress that the Argus II provides a kind of artificial vision, really a brand-new sense that people must learn how to use. Argus II users perceive shades of gray that appear and disappear as they move their heads.

So it's not like millionaires with blurring are going to be getting in line. This seems like it's for the totally blind.

Perceive also:

https://secondsight.com/discover-argus/

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/eyes/financials?...

Probably because they weren't the only company working on this and selling products and even at $500K they weren't making money:

it faced financial headwinds. Second Sight was selling the Argus II for around $150,000 in the United States—about five times as much as other neuromodulation devices, according to Greenberg. But even so, he says, the company was losing money: “With all the overhead of sales and regulatory people, it wasn’t profitable.”

this doesn't surprise me at all. I've had many negative experiences with companies that make disability aids. the target market is poor and vulnerable, they're often monopolies, and they can charge tons of money for crappy tech through insurance.

I bet insurance companies declined to pay what they wanted and they decided to pack up shop in search of a bigger exit. wonder if they ever lose sleep about their abandoned users.

All this, plus the fact that there are lots of pathologies which can lead to similar results, so the effective target market for assistive devices tends to be much smaller than even the small market originally expected.

Further shrunk by communities “closing up” from a combination of having been burned too many times, discrimination / in-group assistance, and viewing attempts to “fix” them as ableism, accommodation refusal, and further efforts to shun them / discriminate against them / divide them. See e.g. colchear implants in the deaf community.

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