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Back around maybe 1988-9 I worked with a company that built the first big screen video card for the Mac 2. They went to Sony and said "we want to buy 15,000 mon
by Taniwha 7y ago
Back around maybe 1988-9 I worked with a company that built the first big screen video card for the Mac 2. They went to Sony and said "we want to buy 15,000 monitors", they were humorously heavy 19 inch 1kx768 monitors, cost something like $5-10k.
Sony laughed at us, we'd never sell that many, besides (unlike TVs) they essentially made them by hand on a minimalist assembly line - we sold 25k that year.
It's the same chicken and egg thing there's not a lot of incentive to optimise the production costs until the volumes spike and that wont happen until the prices drop
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoSounds like a valid use for burning VC. Rather than subsidize bicycle sharing or cheap car rides, VC could bootstrap scaled production lines for new risky tech.
- rkangel 7y agoChina has basically sorted the scaling of production lines. A large part of the VC money for bicycle sharing should be capex in a large number of bicycles, but that's a lot cheaper than it used to be due to the available manufacturing capability. That's true for general electronic and mechanical stuff and obviously not true for everything. Semiconductor, batteries etc. are much more specialised.