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>Can anyone translate this into language I can understand? (1) "classical competitive analysis" (Porter) would be basing business decisions on market trends.

• Robotbeat 5y ago
  You kinda can “iterate cheaply” for SOME constellations. If your satellite can scale down to cubesat or smaller, it’s becoming feasible to iterate relatively cheaply. I’m thinking of the space IoT startup Swarm (of radio space piracy infamy).
• kiba 5y ago
  But (1) classical analysis is often the only choice especially for building physical products requiring upfront heavy capital investment. You can't "cheaply iterate" to build airplanes or launch a constellation of commercial communications satellites. You have to commit billions to build them first based on theoretical market projections and hope customers will buy it. E.g. both Airbus A380 and Boeing 787 were designed by working backwards from market data analysis. Neither had the money to iterate by having the factory build 10 different airplanes. But this is exactly what SpaceX is doing? Ditto with Starlink.
  • jasode 5y ago
    >But this is exactly what SpaceX is doing? Ditto with Starlink. No, not the same. For SpaceX, Elon spent almost all of of his $160 million PayPal wealth on 3 failed rockets before the 4th finally worked. And that 4th successful rocket test only demonstrated a proof-of-concept and didn't have a real payload from paying customers. That's an example of R&D in physical materials not iterating cheaply like the software world. For Starlink, some google search finds this: "Despite the heavy investment needed to build Starlink, the company's leadership estimates Starlink will cost about $10 billion or more to build" $10 billion is not cheap to build/iterate. Compare to the software world... Kevin Systrom building an iOS app for location check in (Burbn) and then pivoting to a different idea of photo filters (Instagram) is way cheaper than spending millions/billions on destroying rockets and launching satellites.
    • kiba 5y ago
      It is ten billion dollars to build the old system, but the individual satellites can be iterated over. Ditto with Starship. Yes, they are all more expensive than software, often much more so to iterate over, but fundamentally what SpaceX do is iterative development.
      • jasode 5y ago
        >, but fundamentally what SpaceX do is iterative development. Yes, SpaceX and many other companies (aircraft companies, car companies, etc) also "iterate" ... but you're losing sight of the original question[1] that was ask by gp (Stratoscope) and the context of "iterative development" for this thread. The author of the paper was trying to explain the difference between "classical analysis" vs "experimentation" to drive new business strategy. Yes the companies forced to do "classical analysis" _also_ do product "experimentation/iteration". However, when the author breaks out "experimentation/iteration" as a separate type of "business learning", he's talking about Eric Ries' version of "fast & cheap iteration" and not SpaceX's slower more expensive iteration. >It is ten billion dollars to build the old system, [...] Yes, they are all more expensive than software, And these are the real-world financial constraints that bias "classical analysis" over cheap iteration of the author's two learning styles. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27232118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27232118