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Pretending you have a working technology when you don't has been a recent theme in the startup world.
by AJ007 11y ago
Pretending you have a working technology when you don't has been a recent theme in the startup world.
- icebraining 11y agoVaporware is neither new nor restricted to the startup world. There's actually a whole (sub)genre of music based on the concept!
- drdeca 11y agoVaporwave?
- drivers99 11y agoThomas Edison claimed to have a long lasting light bulb before he actually did. He showed it to reporters one at a time in a booth. Between observers, he would change out the light for a fresh one. Source "How We Got to Now: Light" (on Netflix currently, at least in the US). Found the clip on PBS. Skip to 2:20 for the specific part: http://www.pbs.org/how-we-got-to-now/big-ideas/light/ http://www.pbs.org/how-we-got-to-now/big-ideas/light/
- pluma 11y agoI thought Edison had mostly been dismissed as not even remotely as great an inventor as most people thought he was?
- throwaway7767 11y agoHe was a businessman, who hired people to invent things. He was certainly useful, but it's always been surprising to me how much credit he got for inventing things.
- gohrt 11y agoCapitalism and Personal Branding at its finest.
- CPLX 11y agoTo a tiny universe of Reddit/XKCD readers perhaps. In the rest of the world, for example at the offices of Con Edison, or in the city of Edison, New Jersey, he's still considered to be somewhat important.
- Nadya 11y agoDon't forget The Oatmeal readers! [0] There's a billion and one things one could mention about Tesla. Sadly, only the tiny universe of people who dislike Edison (and see him as a businessman, not an inventor) are aware of Tesla's contributions. [0] http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla
- graeham 11y agoHe was also pretty bold on pricing, electing to set the initial price off what he predicted eventual costs of production would be. Initially, new products would be sold at a loss. Perhaps not controversial in the perspective of modern venture-backed startups, but at the time it was a key reason GE won early market share on so many products.
- eli 11y agoI hardly think that's a recent development. Plenty of technology has been sold that way for a long time.
- GFischer 11y agoIt even has its own term, "Vaporware": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware "Vaporware first implied intentional fraud when it was applied to the Ovation office suite in 1983; the suite's demonstration was well received by the press, but the product was later revealed to have never existed."
- rblatz 11y agoIt's just an extension of "do things that don't scale."
- trop 11y agoOr compare in literature, to Victor Pelevin's (somewhat dystopian) novel Omon Ra's "highly complex automated systems"...