13 ms·

That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. After reality kicks in and unforeseen issues arise (remember 2020? me nei

by qayxc 5y ago

That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. After reality kicks in and unforeseen issues arise (remember 2020? me neither), plans need to be adjusted. The scale model was initially expected to fly in 2018 even [1]. I expect further delays to be realistic as well. They either going to deliver sometime in the next decade or go bankrupt/sold out within the next couple of years. [1] https://blog.wandr.me/2017/11/false-hope-boom-supersonic-travel-2018/ https://blog.wandr.me/2017/11/false-hope-boom-supersonic-tra...

aliswe 5y ago
> press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. I disagree. The job of IR communicators (employed within the company) is not to hype up a stock - its to give correct information regarding it. Every nudge up has a subsequent nudge down, and every nudge down has a subsequent nudge up. If that doesnt make sense, if a positive effect is seen upon a shares price, right after you are almost guaranteed to see a downwards correction explained by a bit of depression at the end of a mania. (stock markets are sometimes referred to as being manic depressive - iirc Warren Buffet said this amongst others). Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA) famously said that entering the stock market is like peeing yourself: "first it becomes warm, warm. then it becomes cold, cold" And vice versa with dips -people seem to momentarily go "well it cant be THAT bad" and at the end of a dip the share price often goes up a little bit. And no corporation wants to have a volatile stock. They want a stable stock that big investors can put money on. That is why the IR communicators jobs are to stabilize the dtock by NOT hypeing anything up in the PRs as they know that if they do, they contribute to the stocks volatility. And this is why we have profit warnings - the IR department saying before a report goes out that "hey - the report is gonna be better than forecasted" or REVERSE profit warnings for the opposite case. (im not an expert so those terms might be reversed) In other words, profit warnings have the sole purpose of stabilizing the stock as do the whole IR depts operations. So a serious publicly noted company would not benefit from doing what you say - "press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines". just my 2 cents, whatever that means.
Opt_Out_Fed_IRS 5y ago
Doesn't management and C-suite executives lose the respect of technical people in the company when they do media appearences and sign off this sort of overtly-optimistic PR pieces?
- shakezula 5y ago
  In my experience, it's usually the C suite who's pushing these type of overly-optimistic PR pieces.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    Which means they find some senior technical person to actually be part of the announcement, to give it more credibility. They're reading off a C-suite script, yes, but they are putting their names to it.
    - shakezula 5y ago
      For sure, but it also means that they aren't getting to add their own part to the script either, which is probably a lengthy and detailed "yes, but..."
- landemva 5y ago
  United Airlines press release for woke jetsetters: carbon neutral, carbon capture, soybean oil fuel.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. No, this isn’t normal at all. Some optimism is expected but promising commercial operation a couple years out when they weren’t even close to anything like it is simply lying. We shouldn’t be giving companies a pass for this stuff
- lumost 5y ago
  The optimistic timeline may have been based on "if we get the money and customers we expect, and they don't have any special requirements". When the above isn't true you're likely to see a slower rollout. The company is projecting the optimistic form of their current plan to attract investors/customers who will help make that timeline a reality.
- theptip 5y ago
  2020 was not normal for the travel industry. Would not be surprising if they went into hibernation, and/or all of their order book was paused while covid uncertainty persisted.
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    Boom supersonic isn't travel industry. It's silicon valley engineering.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      No it's actual real engineering. They're located in Denver.
    - theptip 5y ago
      The title of TFA is "United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic". I would describe United Airlines as in the travel industry.
- cglace 5y ago
  What do you propose “we” do?
agumonkey 5y ago
should we buy BOOM stock ? :)
the8472 5y ago
If they take too long they might have to compete with suborbital rocket flights.
chubot 5y ago
Yeah it's not surprising. I'm kinda disappointed since I'd be excited about faster flights to Europe and Asia, and I would pay for it Since they're telling me it's 2029, what I really hear is 2030 or 2035, or never. So that means I'll probably be stuck on the same slow flights for more than a decade :-( It doesn't feel like this is a space where there is a lot of competition.
- burlesona 5y ago
  You’re correct that there isn’t a lot of competition.
  - njarboe 5y ago
    SpaceX's Starship could be.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      Starship isn’t going to compete with aerial flight nor is it even trying to...
      - chromaton 5y ago
        SpaceX has said otherwise: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/nyc-to-shanghai-in-40-minutes-spacexs-goal-for-point-to-point-travel.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/nyc-to-shanghai-in-40-minute...
        hef19898 5y ago
        Will it compete in the air taxi market as well?
        edgyquant 5y ago
        Let me rephrase then: it will be decades before putting a human into orbit is cheaper than flying from one point to another on the surface (which can be done for a little more than a thousand dollars) if ever. So maybe SpaceX has said that, but the first part of my sentence still holds. SpaceX isn’t going to be competitive with air travel probably in my lifetime.
xkjkls 5y ago
> That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. No, they don't. I don't know how much Elon Musk has tricked people into thinking it is normal for companies to be perpetually late, but it is definitely not normal.
jandrese 5y ago
To be fair most people were calling even that scale model test timeline hopelessly optimistic. That they didn't deliver on their impossible timetable is not a huge surprise. That said, a lot of people also expected them to fold by now and were definitely not expecting a fairly major order from a large airline.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Didn't a competitor just go bist despite having 29 jets in the order book?
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    Aerion closed in March. I pasted a link in this thread earlier.
dfsegoat 5y ago
Meanwhile, USAF just fully designed and tested a 6th generation fighter [1] in record time [during 2020]: https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-air-force-has-built-and-flown-a-mysterious-full-scale-prototype-of-its-future-fighter-jet/ https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-... They say the key to the record time was an 'all virtual' prototype design and test process. I found that pretty fascinating. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth-generation_fighter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth-generation_fighter
- hef19898 5y ago
  Dassault did something similar like 10 years ago with one of their business jets. In that case, it was also to showcase the capabilities of Catia. Still amazes me, on the one hand you have the Air Forces one-year project. On the other hand you have the German Air Force that needs more than that just ginish the first draft of the requirements document for an existing plane.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Don't rule out the design/development of other planes in US arsenal. The F-35 is just in the news here this week (yeserday maybe) about it being a meh plane because of the bureaucratic process. The Air Force project seems to be an outlier and definitely not the norm.
    - MaxDPS 5y ago
      That’s true, though given this success, hopefully they can name it the norm going forward.
      - justapassenger 5y ago
        I'd love that as well, but research projects are very very very different from actual huge contracts. Especially with how politically engineered supply chain has to be in USA. And changing that isn't technical challenge - it's political one, and no one will dare to do it.
dylan604 5y ago
>(remember 2020? me neither) I'm firmly in the camp of when people ask how old we are, we get to --actualAge (as long as you birthday is after lock downs). It's like the old drinking adage, if you can't remember it, it didn't happen.
ksec 5y ago
>That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. It is only in US and Silicon Valley that it is called Super Optimistic. Many parts of the world look at the difference in projected TimeLine from 2020 to 2029 ( A difference of 9X ) and we call that BS or flat out lying.
- andromeduck 5y ago
  mid-2020s should probably be read as more ~2025 +/- 1
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > mid-2020s should probably be read as more ~2025 +/- 1 Estimating mid-2020s on a start-up’s new platform and landing it in 2028 is a massive win and far from B.S.
  - ksec 5y ago
    My fault. In that case those statement are perfectly fine in my book. Thanks for pointing it out.
avereveard 5y ago
> That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. we've just coming out from a years of travel restrictions, makes sense to reduce rd spending to extend the runway

by qayxc 5y ago

aliswe 5y ago

> press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. I disagree. The job of IR communicators (employed within the company) is not to hype up a stock - its to give correct information regarding it. Every nudge up has a subsequent nudge down, and every nudge down has a subsequent nudge up. If that doesnt make sense, if a positive effect is seen upon a shares price, right after you are almost guaranteed to see a downwards correction explained by a bit of depression at the end of a mania. (stock markets are sometimes referred to as being manic depressive - iirc Warren Buffet said this amongst others). Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA) famously said that entering the stock market is like peeing yourself: "first it becomes warm, warm. then it becomes cold, cold" And vice versa with dips -people seem to momentarily go "well it cant be THAT bad" and at the end of a dip the share price often goes up a little bit. And no corporation wants to have a volatile stock. They want a stable stock that big investors can put money on. That is why the IR communicators jobs are to stabilize the dtock by NOT hypeing anything up in the PRs as they know that if they do, they contribute to the stocks volatility. And this is why we have profit warnings - the IR department saying before a report goes out that "hey - the report is gonna be better than forecasted" or REVERSE profit warnings for the opposite case. (im not an expert so those terms might be reversed) In other words, profit warnings have the sole purpose of stabilizing the stock as do the whole IR depts operations. So a serious publicly noted company would not benefit from doing what you say - "press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines". just my 2 cents, whatever that means.

Opt_Out_Fed_IRS 5y ago

Doesn't management and C-suite executives lose the respect of technical people in the company when they do media appearences and sign off this sort of overtly-optimistic PR pieces?

shakezula 5y ago
In my experience, it's usually the C suite who's pushing these type of overly-optimistic PR pieces.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Which means they find some senior technical person to actually be part of the announcement, to give it more credibility. They're reading off a C-suite script, yes, but they are putting their names to it.
  - shakezula 5y ago
    For sure, but it also means that they aren't getting to add their own part to the script either, which is probably a lengthy and detailed "yes, but..."
landemva 5y ago
United Airlines press release for woke jetsetters: carbon neutral, carbon capture, soybean oil fuel.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. No, this isn’t normal at all. Some optimism is expected but promising commercial operation a couple years out when they weren’t even close to anything like it is simply lying. We shouldn’t be giving companies a pass for this stuff

lumost 5y ago
The optimistic timeline may have been based on "if we get the money and customers we expect, and they don't have any special requirements". When the above isn't true you're likely to see a slower rollout. The company is projecting the optimistic form of their current plan to attract investors/customers who will help make that timeline a reality.
theptip 5y ago
2020 was not normal for the travel industry. Would not be surprising if they went into hibernation, and/or all of their order book was paused while covid uncertainty persisted.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  Boom supersonic isn't travel industry. It's silicon valley engineering.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    No it's actual real engineering. They're located in Denver.
  - theptip 5y ago
    The title of TFA is "United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic". I would describe United Airlines as in the travel industry.
cglace 5y ago
What do you propose “we” do?

agumonkey 5y ago

should we buy BOOM stock ? :)

the8472 5y ago

If they take too long they might have to compete with suborbital rocket flights.

chubot 5y ago

Yeah it's not surprising. I'm kinda disappointed since I'd be excited about faster flights to Europe and Asia, and I would pay for it Since they're telling me it's 2029, what I really hear is 2030 or 2035, or never. So that means I'll probably be stuck on the same slow flights for more than a decade :-( It doesn't feel like this is a space where there is a lot of competition.

burlesona 5y ago
You’re correct that there isn’t a lot of competition.
- njarboe 5y ago
  SpaceX's Starship could be.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Starship isn’t going to compete with aerial flight nor is it even trying to...
    - chromaton 5y ago
      SpaceX has said otherwise: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/nyc-to-shanghai-in-40-minutes-spacexs-goal-for-point-to-point-travel.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/nyc-to-shanghai-in-40-minute...
      - hef19898 5y ago
        Will it compete in the air taxi market as well?
      - edgyquant 5y ago
        Let me rephrase then: it will be decades before putting a human into orbit is cheaper than flying from one point to another on the surface (which can be done for a little more than a thousand dollars) if ever. So maybe SpaceX has said that, but the first part of my sentence still holds. SpaceX isn’t going to be competitive with air travel probably in my lifetime.

xkjkls 5y ago

> That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. No, they don't. I don't know how much Elon Musk has tricked people into thinking it is normal for companies to be perpetually late, but it is definitely not normal.

jandrese 5y ago

To be fair most people were calling even that scale model test timeline hopelessly optimistic. That they didn't deliver on their impossible timetable is not a huge surprise. That said, a lot of people also expected them to fold by now and were definitely not expecting a fairly major order from a large airline.

hef19898 5y ago
Didn't a competitor just go bist despite having 29 jets in the order book?
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  Aerion closed in March. I pasted a link in this thread earlier.

dfsegoat 5y ago

Meanwhile, USAF just fully designed and tested a 6th generation fighter [1] in record time [during 2020]: https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-air-force-has-built-and-flown-a-mysterious-full-scale-prototype-of-its-future-fighter-jet/ https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-... They say the key to the record time was an 'all virtual' prototype design and test process. I found that pretty fascinating. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth-generation_fighter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth-generation_fighter

hef19898 5y ago
Dassault did something similar like 10 years ago with one of their business jets. In that case, it was also to showcase the capabilities of Catia. Still amazes me, on the one hand you have the Air Forces one-year project. On the other hand you have the German Air Force that needs more than that just ginish the first draft of the requirements document for an existing plane.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Don't rule out the design/development of other planes in US arsenal. The F-35 is just in the news here this week (yeserday maybe) about it being a meh plane because of the bureaucratic process. The Air Force project seems to be an outlier and definitely not the norm.
  - MaxDPS 5y ago
    That’s true, though given this success, hopefully they can name it the norm going forward.
    - justapassenger 5y ago
      I'd love that as well, but research projects are very very very different from actual huge contracts. Especially with how politically engineered supply chain has to be in USA. And changing that isn't technical challenge - it's political one, and no one will dare to do it.

dylan604 5y ago

>(remember 2020? me neither) I'm firmly in the camp of when people ask how old we are, we get to --actualAge (as long as you birthday is after lock downs). It's like the old drinking adage, if you can't remember it, it didn't happen.

ksec 5y ago

>That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. It is only in US and Silicon Valley that it is called Super Optimistic. Many parts of the world look at the difference in projected TimeLine from 2020 to 2029 ( A difference of 9X ) and we call that BS or flat out lying.

andromeduck 5y ago
mid-2020s should probably be read as more ~2025 +/- 1
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > mid-2020s should probably be read as more ~2025 +/- 1 Estimating mid-2020s on a start-up’s new platform and landing it in 2028 is a massive win and far from B.S.
- ksec 5y ago
  My fault. In that case those statement are perfectly fine in my book. Thanks for pointing it out.

avereveard 5y ago

> That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. we've just coming out from a years of travel restrictions, makes sense to reduce rd spending to extend the runway