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It's strange how this article was written as if the author doesn't realize that there are more things than just power/speed dictating what it means for a techno

It's strange how this article was written as if the author doesn't realize that there are more things than just power/speed dictating what it means for a technology to be successful. Technology like the Concorde or Bugatti Veyron wasn't taken away from us, it was just rendered obsolete. What killed the Concorde? Broadband Internet. Who needs to fly to Europe all the time if you can just video chat? The Concorde is noisy, uncomfortable, and highly polluting. If one could make a better version of the Concorde I'm sure people would be into it...but really the "big win" of using this jet was that you got somewhere a couple hours faster, and it cost 3x the normal price of an airline. What normal person would really be doing this? What killed the Bugatti Veyron? I guess this one is a general sense of "YAGNI", because seriously who gives a shit. The car doesn't look all that nice, who cares if it can go real fast. Fast engines are not what makes good cars, there are lots of other factors involved.

mikeash 9y ago
I’d argue that the 70s oil crises killed Concorde. It was basically DOA. It limped along for decades having built only 12 airplanes and serving only two routes in the long term. It never really made money, roughly breaking even operationally but not paying back its R&D. It was ultimately a prestige project. It got that job done pretty well, but it was never successful in a way that would persist. The Veyron is an even more extreme example of that. It was intended to be a prestige product from the start. It wasn’t supposed to make money and it only gets produced until the company comes up with a different way to spend that marketing or research budget. Edit: the Veyron is a particularly terrible example here because it was discontinued in favor of a new model that's even more insane. The Veyron was succeeded by the Chiron, which has an anticipated top speed of 288MPH, although it's currently electronically limited to "only" 261MPH. I don't see any way in which the Chiron is substantially inferior, so I don't see how it could possibly be an example of a major technological advance fading away.
- gok 9y ago
  The US ban on supersonic overflight killed supersonic travel, and therefore Concorde. 1960s tech was only able to build planes that could go about 3500 nm, and a huge proportion of flights in that range at that time was transcontinental flights across North America. The cancellation of all American operator orders made the project impossible to break even. The fuel costs were nasty, but not the end of the world. The existence of first class travel shows that there’s a market for expensive, inefficient long haul flights. If supersonic passenger flight had been able to survive American protectionism, it would have avoided missing out on the last 50 years of R&D, so SSTs today would have gotten much more efficient, just like today’s sub sonic jets have become.
- cstross 9y ago
  Hark back to 1973 when Concorde production began and they had around 120 advance orders/options. Most of which evaporated because of not only the oil shock but, significantly, the discovery that the Boeing 747 (and other wide-bodies) could make huge amounts of revenue by carrying more passengers, cheaper. The 747 was originally expected to be a cargo freighter, once SSTs like Concorde ate the passenger market in the 80s, hence the high cockpit positioned over the nose door on the cargo variants. Concorde was the last gasp of the idea that air travel was a very expensive form of transport for the elite, who would pay to save time over taking an ocean liner. Instead we got the democratization of air travel. It's no accident that the cruise liner died out as a normal form of international transport (as opposed to a recreational vehicle) at the same time that wide-body airliners caught on. (Side-note: the plans for Concorde B are worth googling — an incremental upgrade with quieter engines and a range that could have stretched to 5000 miles, opening up a bunch more routes, and due to enter production by 1982.) Graffiti: I used it and I don't miss it! While early on-screen multitouch keyboards sucked, what really makes Graffiti show its age is modern gesture-based systems like Swype or SwiftKey, where each word is a unique ideogram composed by dragging a finger across a QWERTY map in letter order. Graffiti typically took 2-3 gestures to enter a letter: with Swype I'm typically on 5-7 gestures per word, which overall is much faster (average word length in English is 5.5 letters). Graffiti has in fact been ported to iOS and Android ... but relatively few people use it because times have moved on.
  - notahacker 9y ago
    Yeah, ultimately the Concorde failed because it was worst-in-class for the stuff that turned out to actually matter (cost per revenue passenger km, noise, range) The "spruce goose" still holds the record for biggest wingspan of any aircraft and largest ever flying boat, and the Hindenberg class airships for largest ever aircraft (and probably least flight-like experience), and ultimately Concorde's speed turned out to be no more relevant to its commercial viability...
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    Never heard of the B model, thanks for the trivia chase http://www.concordesst.com/concordeb.html http://www.concordesst.com/concordeb.html
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> What killed the Concorde? Broadband Internet Transatlantic flights have increased in frequency since broadband. There is tremendous value in face-to-face meetings.

mikeash 9y ago

I’d argue that the 70s oil crises killed Concorde. It was basically DOA. It limped along for decades having built only 12 airplanes and serving only two routes in the long term. It never really made money, roughly breaking even operationally but not paying back its R&D. It was ultimately a prestige project. It got that job done pretty well, but it was never successful in a way that would persist. The Veyron is an even more extreme example of that. It was intended to be a prestige product from the start. It wasn’t supposed to make money and it only gets produced until the company comes up with a different way to spend that marketing or research budget. Edit: the Veyron is a particularly terrible example here because it was discontinued in favor of a new model that's even more insane. The Veyron was succeeded by the Chiron, which has an anticipated top speed of 288MPH, although it's currently electronically limited to "only" 261MPH. I don't see any way in which the Chiron is substantially inferior, so I don't see how it could possibly be an example of a major technological advance fading away.

gok 9y ago
The US ban on supersonic overflight killed supersonic travel, and therefore Concorde. 1960s tech was only able to build planes that could go about 3500 nm, and a huge proportion of flights in that range at that time was transcontinental flights across North America. The cancellation of all American operator orders made the project impossible to break even. The fuel costs were nasty, but not the end of the world. The existence of first class travel shows that there’s a market for expensive, inefficient long haul flights. If supersonic passenger flight had been able to survive American protectionism, it would have avoided missing out on the last 50 years of R&D, so SSTs today would have gotten much more efficient, just like today’s sub sonic jets have become.
cstross 9y ago
Hark back to 1973 when Concorde production began and they had around 120 advance orders/options. Most of which evaporated because of not only the oil shock but, significantly, the discovery that the Boeing 747 (and other wide-bodies) could make huge amounts of revenue by carrying more passengers, cheaper. The 747 was originally expected to be a cargo freighter, once SSTs like Concorde ate the passenger market in the 80s, hence the high cockpit positioned over the nose door on the cargo variants. Concorde was the last gasp of the idea that air travel was a very expensive form of transport for the elite, who would pay to save time over taking an ocean liner. Instead we got the democratization of air travel. It's no accident that the cruise liner died out as a normal form of international transport (as opposed to a recreational vehicle) at the same time that wide-body airliners caught on. (Side-note: the plans for Concorde B are worth googling — an incremental upgrade with quieter engines and a range that could have stretched to 5000 miles, opening up a bunch more routes, and due to enter production by 1982.) Graffiti: I used it and I don't miss it! While early on-screen multitouch keyboards sucked, what really makes Graffiti show its age is modern gesture-based systems like Swype or SwiftKey, where each word is a unique ideogram composed by dragging a finger across a QWERTY map in letter order. Graffiti typically took 2-3 gestures to enter a letter: with Swype I'm typically on 5-7 gestures per word, which overall is much faster (average word length in English is 5.5 letters). Graffiti has in fact been ported to iOS and Android ... but relatively few people use it because times have moved on.
- notahacker 9y ago
  Yeah, ultimately the Concorde failed because it was worst-in-class for the stuff that turned out to actually matter (cost per revenue passenger km, noise, range) The "spruce goose" still holds the record for biggest wingspan of any aircraft and largest ever flying boat, and the Hindenberg class airships for largest ever aircraft (and probably least flight-like experience), and ultimately Concorde's speed turned out to be no more relevant to its commercial viability...
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Never heard of the B model, thanks for the trivia chase http://www.concordesst.com/concordeb.html http://www.concordesst.com/concordeb.html

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> What killed the Concorde? Broadband Internet Transatlantic flights have increased in frequency since broadband. There is tremendous value in face-to-face meetings.