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> That's the Tesla situation. Product is OK. Customers are enthusiastic. Production is in trouble. Cost and labor hours per car are way too high. The financial

> That's the Tesla situation. Product is OK. Customers are enthusiastic. Production is in trouble. Cost and labor hours per car are way too high. The financial situation isn't good. That's usually when the board and stockholders put in an operations-oriented CEO. And in doing so risk that the company becomes another GE-like corporate which is no longer able to innovate and inspire people. Things have changed. Markets have changed. Innovation cycles have become much shorter.

aries1980 8y ago
> Innovation cycles have become much shorter. Yes, but you need to build up a world-wide customer support network that is willing to learn these new innovations that fast at a modest rate. If Tesla would stay in the performance car segment, then the company doesn't need to scale the customer service that much. If you smash a bit your McLaren, you accept that only a handful of companies can fix it. But when you want to roll out and dominate the average joe market with the Model 3, you need to be able to sell it with a moderate maintenance cost. That can only happen if the local car mechanics are able to fix it, but this unlikely happen if every new model comes with radical changes.
- justtopost 8y ago
  You, nor your local mechanic, can work on teslas. While your mclaren dealer would freakout, and your value perhaps drop, you can poke into whatever guts you want. Until you can OWN a tesla, I think they will stay a cult minority.
konschubert 8y ago
> Innovation cycles have become much shorter. This is constantly being repeated but I doubt it is true
- starbugs 8y ago
  Just one very popular example: the length of the Walkman lifecycle was about 30 years. How long was the lifecycle of the iPod? Do you have any evidence to support your claim? I'd be honestly interested.
  - konschubert 8y ago
    Let's say the speed of long distance travel. I dropped dramatically when railways were invented and dropped again when commercial airliners became common. In between these short bursts of innovation, not much has happened. I just noticed though that I may be talking about a slightly different thing here, speed of innovation vs product life cycles.
    - whamlastxmas 8y ago
      If you're going to look as far back as the creation of the railway, I think a more accurate perspective is that it took a few thousand years from the dawn of civilization to the railway, a hundred years from rail to cars, a couple decades from cars to popular commercial aviation. Speed of innovation accelerating still applies.

aries1980 8y ago

> Innovation cycles have become much shorter. Yes, but you need to build up a world-wide customer support network that is willing to learn these new innovations that fast at a modest rate. If Tesla would stay in the performance car segment, then the company doesn't need to scale the customer service that much. If you smash a bit your McLaren, you accept that only a handful of companies can fix it. But when you want to roll out and dominate the average joe market with the Model 3, you need to be able to sell it with a moderate maintenance cost. That can only happen if the local car mechanics are able to fix it, but this unlikely happen if every new model comes with radical changes.

justtopost 8y ago
You, nor your local mechanic, can work on teslas. While your mclaren dealer would freakout, and your value perhaps drop, you can poke into whatever guts you want. Until you can OWN a tesla, I think they will stay a cult minority.

konschubert 8y ago

> Innovation cycles have become much shorter. This is constantly being repeated but I doubt it is true

starbugs 8y ago
Just one very popular example: the length of the Walkman lifecycle was about 30 years. How long was the lifecycle of the iPod? Do you have any evidence to support your claim? I'd be honestly interested.
- konschubert 8y ago
  Let's say the speed of long distance travel. I dropped dramatically when railways were invented and dropped again when commercial airliners became common. In between these short bursts of innovation, not much has happened. I just noticed though that I may be talking about a slightly different thing here, speed of innovation vs product life cycles.
  - whamlastxmas 8y ago
    If you're going to look as far back as the creation of the railway, I think a more accurate perspective is that it took a few thousand years from the dawn of civilization to the railway, a hundred years from rail to cars, a couple decades from cars to popular commercial aviation. Speed of innovation accelerating still applies.