Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

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It's more about the consumer's satisfaction IMHO. For one reason or another, it appears that the Tesla customers are happy with their purchase.

There is a cult mentality and the cult members are happy with what they got, even if it's not exactly as advertised however it's not just about the cult mentality but it's about the overall experience of the product.

I think if Elizabeth Holmes delivered slick blood testing machines that work no different than those on the market(large amount if blood instead of a drop), but had better workflow and user experience, Theranos could have been a success like Tesla.

She tried to imitate Steve Jobs, had she imitated Elon Musk she would have been fine. She should have had the Siemens machines modified to work with modern GUI, developed some automation for drawing large quantities of blood in a pod at the mall and integrate all that with the healthcare and keep repeating that in 2 years just a drop of blood would ne enough.

The only difference between Musk and Holmes was that Musk actually delivered something that had some redeeming properties.

The cars are nice and fun to drive. The charging network is ubiquitous and works perfectly. The highway-based "autopilot" isn't revolutionary, compared to other similar products, but works competently and makes long drives easier. The FSD Beta is a hot steaming pile of garbage that will kill people given the slightest opportunity.

Exactly, Theranos' R&D is also capable of threatening people's health by giving too inacurate results. Instead, they should have made an App that coordinates healthcare providers with service points where modified for automation Siemens machines are used. When asked about the single drop tests, just say its coming in 2 years and if the tech and science develops enough some time in the future they can do that too.

Exactly, FSD isn't comparable to theranos because theranos wasn't out there actively being the root cause of accidents and injuries like FSD was.

It's more about the consumer's satisfaction IMHO.

You could say this about Chrome, Apple's walled garden..and a bunch of things

> I think if Elizabeth Holmes delivered slick blood testing machines that work no different than those on the market(large amount if blood instead of a drop), but had better workflow and user experience, Theranos could have been a success like Tesla.

I wouldn't have said that Tesla just imitated existing car companies. Can you elaborate?

I don't suggest that at all. What Tesla did was to create an electric car with good user experience without developing any revolutionary tech. That's what Theranos should have done, create a good user experience on the existing tech. They did wrong by betting on inventing the tech.

If Tesla's prime value proposal was to invent some tech that will do something revolutionary, they would have gone bust like Theranos. Instead, they built charging network and kick ass infotainments system that made their electric cars practical.

I very much disagree. They didn't just make cars "that work no different than those on the market". They jump-started mass-market electrification of cars, solving who knows how many problems along the way, in technology, business, regulation, manufacturing, etc etc. That's very different to making another Ford Focus.

I never said they did another Ford focus. They used available tech to make an electric car that didn't suck in a way all other electric cars sucked.

Tesla did and is betting on battery costs coming down due in part to tech under development and they could have been on the wrong side of that bet. I think unlike Theranos, battery tech has a semipredictable cost curve

Betting on economies of scale and improved performance is quite different than betting on tech that doesn't exist. Theranos bet on doing over 200 blood test from single drop of blood, which is science fiction. They may try to solve it but there's no clear path.

Theranos could have been amazing; the core conceit of "cram a bunch of different experts into a room and let them riff off each other" could have been amazing.

The Problem is that it didn't happen, because Elizabeth Holmes was a control-freak fraudster. She specifically siloed them to try and control information, which is the exact opposite of "put em in a room together".

> What Tesla did was to create an electric car with good user experience without developing any revolutionary tech

Which would be fine, if they weren't claiming robotaxis any day now.

> I don't suggest that at all. What Tesla did was to create an electric car with good user experience without developing any revolutionary tech.

Not sure what you mean. They are the ones that made the tech good enough for mainstream adoption. Your post reads like the “iPhone didn’t have any revolutionary tech” types.

> They are the ones that made the tech good enough for mainstream adoption.

So, this is a common idea, but it doesn't _really_ gel with reality. The Tesla S, Nissan Leaf, VW's first electric car platform, and the Renault Z-E platform are contemporaries to within about a year (iirc it was Leaf, then an unsuccessful Z-E-based car, then eGolf in limited quantity, then S, then mass-market eGolf and Renault Zoe). Of these, the Leaf sold far more units than the S over its lifetime; the Zoe was about the same as the S, the eGolf somewhat less.

Tesla didn't have a _true_ mass-market car until the Model 3 some years later.

Your chronology is screwed up, we didn’t hit mass market until the model 3.

The litmus test is what cars you see on the roads of Wyoming. There are plenty of model 3s, and a leaf was an extremely rare site because the car was nearly useless outside of a city commute.

> The litmus test is what cars you see on the roads of Wyoming.

Given that US adoption of electric cars lagged other developed world countries, and thus early electric cars were generally designed for European, Chinese, and to some extent Japanese, market preferences, that seems like an extremely weird litmus test. Tesla _was_ the first company to release a mass-market car aimed at the _US_ market (or at least the first credible attempt; the Leaf was available in the US but was just too far from US market preferences), but the Chinese and European markets already had mass-market electric cars.

The iPhone didn't have any revolutionary tech, in fact, it was quite lacking when you compare what was out there and that's why many people claimed that it will fail.

What iPhone had was a revolutionary user interface that provided the outstanding user experience despite lacking a lot of features and functions.

Its capacitive touchscreen was revolutionary. That's what enabled the UI to be done in a different way. This isn't some "great design creates great product" thing. It's the underlying tech that did it, and if the UI had been different, it would been just as revolutionary.

I would argue that the addition of the app store is what made the iPhone really jump phones forward.

Nope, capacitive screens and multitouch were 30 years old tech. Sure, Apple did engineering to actually make it into the product they shipped but that wasn't what Apple invented with iPhone.

Everything is built from something else. Not doing the fundamental science that leads to a product doesn't mean that the product itself isn't innovative. Apple's interface elements[0] and interactions[1] were no doubt derived from elsewhere too. Getting UI elements on a screen wasn't new. Cramming a capacative touchscreen into a phone was very new.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/bu...

[1] http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

Right, people were buying iPhones because they wanted to touch two or more fingers. Everyone was trying to make screens that can register multiple touches but Apple was the first to crack it and this led to natural success of market demanding multiple touches and they having it.

i think its a decent concept.

had musk not purchased tesla after the roadster was built, all of his claims would have been utter bull. now that there was an entry electric car he could spin any tale or justify any hype by pointing to the one functioning model.

from there it was absolutely the modern car manufacturers game, promise a concept, deliver some part of it, talk about next quarter.

frankly having level 4 self driving pulled of by mercedes in california first should be the ultimate proof. merc did it in house faster without hyping it. wild

> had musk not purchased tesla after the roadster was built

He invested before even the first prototype roadster was built. At no point did he “purchase” Tesla.

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