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Comment by pixie_ | Hacker News Reader

"There’s a lot more money being spent on understanding and modeling the market than on any of the research.” - what the shit

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I'm more surprised at how surprised so many people seem to be at this. This isn't a college student building a music-sharing app here. This is a huge corporation preparing to deliver disruptive technology. Naturally they're doing enormous amounts of market research.

But it doesn't make any sense. Why not spend those enormous amounts in actually producing and shipping it before anyone else does? Market research is sunk cost and doesn't prevent failure.

Why not spend those enormous amounts in actually producing and shipping it before anyone else does?

Because you might be able to make more money with a slow introduction rather than a fast one. Restricting supply means you don't cannibalize the existing flash memory market, and can probably still make huge profits from people who must have the best possible performance.

Also, over-investment in production facilities is a huge risk.

Naturally they're doing enormous amounts of market research.

Does this pass a sanity test? What they're talking about would be the biggest breakthrough in computing in a generation. The question is not whether there's a market for it. The question is whether it works.

Memristors have "been around" in laboratory settings for a few years now. The research is done, now it's time to figure out how to market it. Seems pretty reasonable to me. This is actually very exciting to me, because the concept of a memristor, that of a large amount of small devices storing chunks of a larger piece of memory, is supposedly the same or a similar way that your brain's memory works.

The research is very far from done. Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist but at the lab the guy to my left is one and he's doing a PhD about memristors. I have an experimental device in front of me with wires coming out and stuff, it's based on some titanium alloy. They basically don't know why it works. They have some theories, like conductive ion micro channels forming in the material or something like that. They have two mathematical models of simulation, completely different of each other, and each one "works" under different set of conditions, but unlike transistors, flash memory and other components, the underlying effect that make most memristors work is currently unknown or theoretical. I was quite suprised because they don't tell you this in the news. I'm sure this small detail will not stop HP or Intel from selling it anyway.

Edit: "the concept of a memristor, that of a large amount of small devices storing chunks of a larger piece of memory" <-- this is not the concept of a memristor. Not even close.

Well, we have two models for light, and that doesn't stop us from using it :)

Hopefully it's something like this: If it works, let's sell it, then we can use some money to investigate how does it work and how we can improve it.

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