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Nothing weird about it. It's called first mover's advantage. Wanna make electric cars, you have to beat Tesla. No matter how nice your car is. If your rang

Nothing weird about it. It's called first mover's advantage. Wanna make electric cars, you have to beat Tesla. No matter how nice your car is. If your range is worse. Booo. If your self driving is equivalent or worse, Boo. Whatever Tesla has done, you must be better at. You need better design, cheaper price, better range, better reliability else no one would notice you.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
The problem with this analysis is that first movers usually don't win.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  In the long run, sure. In the short to medium term, though, they solidly dominate the field. We're still in that phase phase of both Tesla and Bing AI.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    In the short term Google has an utterly dominant position in Search, and Bing AI is basically irrelevant to this. What people are worried about are the implications for the long term.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      The comment you replied to makes no mentions of timelines, and everything they said applies up to the point the first mover falls, which is clearly not the long term per your own argument. The goal posts also aren't "search" they're "AI enhanced search", let's not muddy the waters by moving them. Google may certainly be dominating in search, but they are clearly trying to sprint from miles behind in the latter.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - darthrupert 4y ago
      I don't give a fuck about Bing, frankly, but ChatGPT (the actual first mover here) has already replaced a lot of what I used Google for during a work day. I'll be their paying customer soon. It would be great if that meant I had privacy as well, but I kinda bleakly realize that that might be a bit of a pipe dream.
      - philliphaydon 4y ago
        Over the past 2 weeks I’ve barely used Google. I just ask ChatGPT. The results it produces are just superior to Google in every way.
      - l33tman 4y ago
        The big improvement in the chatgpt integrated by bing is that it can take today's search results into the chat to analyze seamlessly (after all, Bing already has all the search results cached internally). ChatGPT as it stands has old knowledge only unless you paste in the results you want to analyze.
    - gjsman-1000 4y ago
      If I were the EU, I would perhaps consider slapping restrictions on Google's Chat AI (say, Bard) as being a separate field (AI-Assisted Search) being propped up by a monopoly in Standard Search. That would hurt Google's dominance quicker than any other action. Same for the DOJ. Remember how much trouble Microsoft got into for having a basic monopoly on desktops with Windows, and trying to bundle Internet Explorer? Replace Windows with Standard Google, and Internet Explorer with AI-based Google Search. You'll cut Google off at the knees with that move. And even if they survive the ~4-5 years litigation, they'll be severely hampered, kind of like how Microsoft was with the mobile phone market.
    - monkmartinez 4y ago
      I have switched to Bing and Edge, then wrote a script to rack up points in hopes that I get moved up for the new BingGPT. Google search results have been trending toward crap for a while from my POV. 'Google it' is sticky, but I absolutely have not missed a beat with Edge and Bing. In fact, Edge has been a really pleasant surprise with features Chrome doesn't have. A calculator in the side bar is fracking awesome!
      - phkahler 4y ago
        >> A calculator in the side bar is fracking awesome! Another case of the browser doing what the OS and Desktop environment should be doing. I like to point at tabs - DEs and GUI toolkits never really came up with a good way to handle multiple documents well.
        mynameisvlad 4y ago
        I think every major OS ships with some sort of calculator. The problem is discoverability. If you're in the middle of browsing, it's quite a bit of effort to say "oh that's right I have a calculator on here let me just find it in the start menu/Applications folder" as opposed to it just being there in the same app you're already using. Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep being tried and abandoned soon after in desktop OSes.
        mejutoco 4y ago
        In linux I press the super key (windows key), type "calc" and enter. In Mac Os one can use spotlight with cmd + space with similar results. Or sometimes I check a calculator I implemented myself (shameless plug: https://getcalculator.app/ https://getcalculator.app/)
        mynameisvlad 4y ago
        I mean, you can do Win+R and then "calc" on windows too, but that's still context switching and having to remember it's there. Once again, compared to it just being there in front of you and ready to go that's still work to do to get it there.
  - nwienert 4y ago
    Bing isn't dominating anything haha.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      I mean, they certainly are in the "AI integrated search" field, considering.... You know.... This entire post and discussion happening.
      - matthewdgreen 4y ago
        Google isn't going to suffer severe business consequences for (temporarily) losing dominance in the "AI integrated search" field, because the revenue from that field is effectively NaN compared to Google's current revenue. They might hypothetically suffer if AI integrated search grows to become a major fraction of the existing Search revenue and Google fails to deploy their massive existing ML/AI resources to match Bing/OpenAI's unpatented, non-secret and easily-replicated techniques. And big firms have made such strategic errors in the past! But none of that is going to happen in the short term.
        mynameisvlad 4y ago
        Please show me exactly where I said otherwise. Read the comment thread you just replied to and tell me how any of what you just said is relevant to me correcting the sentence "Bing isn't dominating anything haha."
        robertlagrant 4y ago
        Good point. It's also dominating in the segment of "web search companies called Bing".
        nwienert 4y ago
        You said they are dominating "AI search" but that's wrong in many ways: - Google's entire search engine has had many layers of "AI" powering it for years. - Bing hasn't even released this supposed AI search engine to the public. Your other example was Tesla and the two examples couldn't be more different. Your statement would be like someone saying Tesla was "dominating" electric cars before they ever even sold a single Roadster and had just posted a demo video. It's just wrong. I can be first to market with a banana that glows in the dark, am I in the club now too? They may dominate if this exact form of conversational answers proves popular and if launched more than a hacked together demo and only then is some strong claim they are doing anything interesting could be worthwhile. Until then they are kind-of first-but-actually-not-really in a kind-of-theoretical-market, and not dominating it all or reaping any first-mover advantage given their opponents are ready to follow on immediately.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    It will be interesting to see how the next few years play out in the EV space. Tesla suddenly has actual competition that is very good. Arguably better, aside from that nagging little detail -- the charger network. Tesla needs to keep throwing money at the Supercharger network and do whatever they can to keep it exclusive. Anything that puts the competition on an equal playing field for fast charging would be devastating to Tesla's market share.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      Yes, I'm quite excited to see the new EVs coming out in the next few years. Still like my Tesla but the list of grievances grows over time. I think they'll ultimately have to open up the charging to get federal funding, but it'll be interesting to see what happens when they do. It's definitely a massive advantage right now.
    - whamlastxmas 4y ago
      It's unlikely Tesla's market share of the total car market is going to go down no matter how well other companies do. What we're seeing is a general shift towards electric cars, which is only a good thing for Tesla.
      - rootusrootus 4y ago
        Yes, in this case when I say 'market share' I mean EV market share.
        whamlastxmas 4y ago
        My point is more that you used the word "devastating" when there's nothing negative happening to Tesla in that situation
    - p4coder 4y ago
      I think the charging network is going to prove to be the iMessage of Tesla. By keeping it closed, they will be selling many more cars. In Europe where they had to use the standard port and open the network, there will be much stiffer competition.
- ralfd 4y ago
  It depends on the definition what "first" means. For example Amazon Kindle was not the first eReader. But its platform-ecosystem was years sooner than Barnes & Nobles Nook and Kindle won out. Amazon itself is technically a "second mover" because there was an obscure online book shop before, but no one else from the established sales companies or Walmart could compete with them. Tesla was not the first electric car. But it is arguably the first reaching a production of a million, so it is the first e-car from a "main" manufacturer?
  - burtness 4y ago
    This sounds more like "incumbent" than "first"
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    Incumbent companies have huge advantages, and it takes a lot to dislodge them even with new technology (as in your Amazon example.) Basically they have to be unwilling to match competitors' tech over a long period of time. In my life I've seen that happen a handful of times. When it does, it's usually due to (1) tragic management ineptitude over an extended period of time, or (2) fear of cannibalizing an existing profitable business (e.g.,: Kodak refusing to move from film to digital cameras, or the car industry being slow to re-invest away from ICE production.) I see no evidence (yet) that AI-enhanced search is going to threaten Google's core business of "displaying ads on relevant search results", so the main risk here is long-term management failure. Right now Google's management is doing everything it can to signal (to shareholders and partners) that they're going to throw every resource they have at the problem.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Kodak actually had one of the first digital cameras, and the company still exists. And automotive OEMs are investing heavily into EVs, and they do this comparatively fast for companies of the size we are talking about.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    "Find the company that survived and got big, then carefully move the historical goalpost so it's first"
- MockObject 4y ago
  Old enough to remember when Google was the plucky newcomer in a crowded search engine industry.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    Google wasn't profitable. Like an ant eating the wrong sort of fungus, the advertising companies won and Google's zombified husk carries on.
    - riskneutral 4y ago
      Cordyceps fungi
  - hmahncke 4y ago
    Old enough to remember when Alta Vista was obviously going to win because it came from DEC.
- alex_sf 4y ago
  They usually don't win in the long-run because someone comes along with > better design, cheaper price, better range, better reliability That doesn't mean the first mover advantage doesn't exist.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    First movers are the first to hit the innovater’s dilemma. They are trapped by the decisions they made as first movers, while later incumbents have freedom to create improvements without worry about the installed base. Apple is one company that never seemed to fall into that trap. They just tell the installed base “fuck you, buy the new thing” and somehow get away with it.
    - smachiz 4y ago
      They're also very very rarely the first mover. Apple comes in and innovates against something that existed but was user hostile. It actually did happen to Apple over a long enough horizon, they cornered the paid digital music market by perfecting it, and upended it, and didn't innovate/upend again, and along came Spotify to upend it for them.
richardwhiuk 4y ago
Or you need a big differentiator which makes you the new first mover.
- bitexploder 4y ago
  You don't even always need a big differentiator. We got rid of our Tesla sacrificing range to have normal vehicle controls. Some times tech just gets good enough that being the first mover can't beat the entrenched players inevitability and willingness to give customers what they ask for instead of insisting you will like something you never asked for, even after you try it and tell them you don't like the thing they insist you will like. Tesla has gone all in on things like touch screens and non-standard controls and it has literally lost them our business twice. I would have bought a Model S Plaid if it just had a normal steering wheel. No questions asked. And my partner would have kept her Model 3 if it didn't have such annoying vehicle controls for certain things. Little stuff really matters and Tesla sticks their head in the sand over it while Audi will happily make you a pretty normal SUV that happens to be zippy and electric.
dragontamer 4y ago
Apple came after Blackberry. Dell came after Commodore / Amiga. Facebook came after MySpace. Google came after Altavisa and Yahoo. Verizon came after AOL. Alternating Current came after Direct Current. Microsoft Word came after WordPerfect. Chrome came after Netscape Communicator. Python came after Perl. Nintendo came after Atari. I feel like first movers advantage is a myth.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  > I feel like first movers advantage is a myth. Maybe. No company lives forever, at some point all of these things will be unseated. But those first movers had pretty good runs, as far as technology companies go. Maybe they aren't still #1 but if you're #1 for a decade or more, that might be as much as any one company can "win" here.
- ericlewis 4y ago
  Apple came after blackberry, but as the parent comment states... you have to be much better and by all accounts the iPhone was much better at things consumers cared about. Dell made better computers. Facebook was nicer than myspace in UI/UX. Google returned superior results. So their point stands. They have to be much better. And all of these were.
  - smachiz 4y ago
    Yes, basically, when you stop innovating and are only doing incremental improvement, someone is going to come and eat your lunch.
- KMnO4 4y ago
  I think you confirmed what he was saying. All of those products that came after are better than the first movers. If Apple was worse than BB, do you think it would have won?
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Every single one of those things you just listed is an improvement in one or more ways (to the average user.) So I really don’t see your point at all
ladyattis 4y ago
I think second mover has a better chance to succeed, even from the first mover themselves (Apple had many ideas for touchscreen devices but most flopped until the 2000s). Iteration on a good enough device or platform will always give you more success than iterating on a false premise (ex. the metaverse).
maeln 4y ago
Telsa is a very good exemple because they just about got beaten off in every category (except maybe the driver assistance features). If you want a cheaper car with a smaller range than the model 3, but still decent, you can look at Volkswagen, Renault, Peugeot, Kia and Hyundai. If you want higher range (and premium/luxury feel) you can look at BMW/Audi/Mercedes. And pretty much all of them have better QC and a vaster maintenance network than Tesla (and in the E.U the charging network all use the same type of connector, so you are not tied to the manufacturer of your car). But still, whenever you talk electric car, people often talk first about Tesla and they have no problem selling them. This might mostly be true in the E.U though. Also the model 3 is still priced fairly well being in-between the higher-end of the market and the intermediate.
senko 4y ago
Tesla wasn't a first mover. Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt were both on the market roughtly 2 years before Model S. Also, you don't really need to beat Tesla if you just want to make (and sell) electric cars. Tesla doesn't fill every niche and is nowhere near enough in terms of volume to satisfy the EV demand. (If you want to be a bigger electric car company than Tesla then you have to beat Tesla, yeah -- that's a tautology, not an interesting observation tho).
fomine3 4y ago
Car manufacturer don't have to beat Tesla because it's not "winner takes all" market. Not good analogy.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

The problem with this analysis is that first movers usually don't win.

mynameisvlad 4y ago
In the long run, sure. In the short to medium term, though, they solidly dominate the field. We're still in that phase phase of both Tesla and Bing AI.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  In the short term Google has an utterly dominant position in Search, and Bing AI is basically irrelevant to this. What people are worried about are the implications for the long term.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    The comment you replied to makes no mentions of timelines, and everything they said applies up to the point the first mover falls, which is clearly not the long term per your own argument. The goal posts also aren't "search" they're "AI enhanced search", let's not muddy the waters by moving them. Google may certainly be dominating in search, but they are clearly trying to sprint from miles behind in the latter.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - darthrupert 4y ago
    I don't give a fuck about Bing, frankly, but ChatGPT (the actual first mover here) has already replaced a lot of what I used Google for during a work day. I'll be their paying customer soon. It would be great if that meant I had privacy as well, but I kinda bleakly realize that that might be a bit of a pipe dream.
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      Over the past 2 weeks I’ve barely used Google. I just ask ChatGPT. The results it produces are just superior to Google in every way.
    - l33tman 4y ago
      The big improvement in the chatgpt integrated by bing is that it can take today's search results into the chat to analyze seamlessly (after all, Bing already has all the search results cached internally). ChatGPT as it stands has old knowledge only unless you paste in the results you want to analyze.
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    If I were the EU, I would perhaps consider slapping restrictions on Google's Chat AI (say, Bard) as being a separate field (AI-Assisted Search) being propped up by a monopoly in Standard Search. That would hurt Google's dominance quicker than any other action. Same for the DOJ. Remember how much trouble Microsoft got into for having a basic monopoly on desktops with Windows, and trying to bundle Internet Explorer? Replace Windows with Standard Google, and Internet Explorer with AI-based Google Search. You'll cut Google off at the knees with that move. And even if they survive the ~4-5 years litigation, they'll be severely hampered, kind of like how Microsoft was with the mobile phone market.
  - monkmartinez 4y ago
    I have switched to Bing and Edge, then wrote a script to rack up points in hopes that I get moved up for the new BingGPT. Google search results have been trending toward crap for a while from my POV. 'Google it' is sticky, but I absolutely have not missed a beat with Edge and Bing. In fact, Edge has been a really pleasant surprise with features Chrome doesn't have. A calculator in the side bar is fracking awesome!
    - phkahler 4y ago
      >> A calculator in the side bar is fracking awesome! Another case of the browser doing what the OS and Desktop environment should be doing. I like to point at tabs - DEs and GUI toolkits never really came up with a good way to handle multiple documents well.
      - mynameisvlad 4y ago
        I think every major OS ships with some sort of calculator. The problem is discoverability. If you're in the middle of browsing, it's quite a bit of effort to say "oh that's right I have a calculator on here let me just find it in the start menu/Applications folder" as opposed to it just being there in the same app you're already using. Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep being tried and abandoned soon after in desktop OSes.
        mejutoco 4y ago
        In linux I press the super key (windows key), type "calc" and enter. In Mac Os one can use spotlight with cmd + space with similar results. Or sometimes I check a calculator I implemented myself (shameless plug: https://getcalculator.app/ https://getcalculator.app/)
        mynameisvlad 4y ago
        I mean, you can do Win+R and then "calc" on windows too, but that's still context switching and having to remember it's there. Once again, compared to it just being there in front of you and ready to go that's still work to do to get it there.
- nwienert 4y ago
  Bing isn't dominating anything haha.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    I mean, they certainly are in the "AI integrated search" field, considering.... You know.... This entire post and discussion happening.
    - matthewdgreen 4y ago
      Google isn't going to suffer severe business consequences for (temporarily) losing dominance in the "AI integrated search" field, because the revenue from that field is effectively NaN compared to Google's current revenue. They might hypothetically suffer if AI integrated search grows to become a major fraction of the existing Search revenue and Google fails to deploy their massive existing ML/AI resources to match Bing/OpenAI's unpatented, non-secret and easily-replicated techniques. And big firms have made such strategic errors in the past! But none of that is going to happen in the short term.
      - mynameisvlad 4y ago
        Please show me exactly where I said otherwise. Read the comment thread you just replied to and tell me how any of what you just said is relevant to me correcting the sentence "Bing isn't dominating anything haha."
        robertlagrant 4y ago
        Good point. It's also dominating in the segment of "web search companies called Bing".
        nwienert 4y ago
        You said they are dominating "AI search" but that's wrong in many ways: - Google's entire search engine has had many layers of "AI" powering it for years. - Bing hasn't even released this supposed AI search engine to the public. Your other example was Tesla and the two examples couldn't be more different. Your statement would be like someone saying Tesla was "dominating" electric cars before they ever even sold a single Roadster and had just posted a demo video. It's just wrong. I can be first to market with a banana that glows in the dark, am I in the club now too? They may dominate if this exact form of conversational answers proves popular and if launched more than a hacked together demo and only then is some strong claim they are doing anything interesting could be worthwhile. Until then they are kind-of first-but-actually-not-really in a kind-of-theoretical-market, and not dominating it all or reaping any first-mover advantage given their opponents are ready to follow on immediately.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  It will be interesting to see how the next few years play out in the EV space. Tesla suddenly has actual competition that is very good. Arguably better, aside from that nagging little detail -- the charger network. Tesla needs to keep throwing money at the Supercharger network and do whatever they can to keep it exclusive. Anything that puts the competition on an equal playing field for fast charging would be devastating to Tesla's market share.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    Yes, I'm quite excited to see the new EVs coming out in the next few years. Still like my Tesla but the list of grievances grows over time. I think they'll ultimately have to open up the charging to get federal funding, but it'll be interesting to see what happens when they do. It's definitely a massive advantage right now.
  - whamlastxmas 4y ago
    It's unlikely Tesla's market share of the total car market is going to go down no matter how well other companies do. What we're seeing is a general shift towards electric cars, which is only a good thing for Tesla.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      Yes, in this case when I say 'market share' I mean EV market share.
      - whamlastxmas 4y ago
        My point is more that you used the word "devastating" when there's nothing negative happening to Tesla in that situation
  - p4coder 4y ago
    I think the charging network is going to prove to be the iMessage of Tesla. By keeping it closed, they will be selling many more cars. In Europe where they had to use the standard port and open the network, there will be much stiffer competition.
ralfd 4y ago
It depends on the definition what "first" means. For example Amazon Kindle was not the first eReader. But its platform-ecosystem was years sooner than Barnes & Nobles Nook and Kindle won out. Amazon itself is technically a "second mover" because there was an obscure online book shop before, but no one else from the established sales companies or Walmart could compete with them. Tesla was not the first electric car. But it is arguably the first reaching a production of a million, so it is the first e-car from a "main" manufacturer?
- burtness 4y ago
  This sounds more like "incumbent" than "first"
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  Incumbent companies have huge advantages, and it takes a lot to dislodge them even with new technology (as in your Amazon example.) Basically they have to be unwilling to match competitors' tech over a long period of time. In my life I've seen that happen a handful of times. When it does, it's usually due to (1) tragic management ineptitude over an extended period of time, or (2) fear of cannibalizing an existing profitable business (e.g.,: Kodak refusing to move from film to digital cameras, or the car industry being slow to re-invest away from ICE production.) I see no evidence (yet) that AI-enhanced search is going to threaten Google's core business of "displaying ads on relevant search results", so the main risk here is long-term management failure. Right now Google's management is doing everything it can to signal (to shareholders and partners) that they're going to throw every resource they have at the problem.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Kodak actually had one of the first digital cameras, and the company still exists. And automotive OEMs are investing heavily into EVs, and they do this comparatively fast for companies of the size we are talking about.
- pjc50 4y ago
  "Find the company that survived and got big, then carefully move the historical goalpost so it's first"
MockObject 4y ago
Old enough to remember when Google was the plucky newcomer in a crowded search engine industry.
- klyrs 4y ago
  Google wasn't profitable. Like an ant eating the wrong sort of fungus, the advertising companies won and Google's zombified husk carries on.
  - riskneutral 4y ago
    Cordyceps fungi
- hmahncke 4y ago
  Old enough to remember when Alta Vista was obviously going to win because it came from DEC.
alex_sf 4y ago
They usually don't win in the long-run because someone comes along with > better design, cheaper price, better range, better reliability That doesn't mean the first mover advantage doesn't exist.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  First movers are the first to hit the innovater’s dilemma. They are trapped by the decisions they made as first movers, while later incumbents have freedom to create improvements without worry about the installed base. Apple is one company that never seemed to fall into that trap. They just tell the installed base “fuck you, buy the new thing” and somehow get away with it.
  - smachiz 4y ago
    They're also very very rarely the first mover. Apple comes in and innovates against something that existed but was user hostile. It actually did happen to Apple over a long enough horizon, they cornered the paid digital music market by perfecting it, and upended it, and didn't innovate/upend again, and along came Spotify to upend it for them.

richardwhiuk 4y ago

Or you need a big differentiator which makes you the new first mover.

bitexploder 4y ago
You don't even always need a big differentiator. We got rid of our Tesla sacrificing range to have normal vehicle controls. Some times tech just gets good enough that being the first mover can't beat the entrenched players inevitability and willingness to give customers what they ask for instead of insisting you will like something you never asked for, even after you try it and tell them you don't like the thing they insist you will like. Tesla has gone all in on things like touch screens and non-standard controls and it has literally lost them our business twice. I would have bought a Model S Plaid if it just had a normal steering wheel. No questions asked. And my partner would have kept her Model 3 if it didn't have such annoying vehicle controls for certain things. Little stuff really matters and Tesla sticks their head in the sand over it while Audi will happily make you a pretty normal SUV that happens to be zippy and electric.

dragontamer 4y ago

Apple came after Blackberry. Dell came after Commodore / Amiga. Facebook came after MySpace. Google came after Altavisa and Yahoo. Verizon came after AOL. Alternating Current came after Direct Current. Microsoft Word came after WordPerfect. Chrome came after Netscape Communicator. Python came after Perl. Nintendo came after Atari. I feel like first movers advantage is a myth.

nkozyra 4y ago
> I feel like first movers advantage is a myth. Maybe. No company lives forever, at some point all of these things will be unseated. But those first movers had pretty good runs, as far as technology companies go. Maybe they aren't still #1 but if you're #1 for a decade or more, that might be as much as any one company can "win" here.
ericlewis 4y ago
Apple came after blackberry, but as the parent comment states... you have to be much better and by all accounts the iPhone was much better at things consumers cared about. Dell made better computers. Facebook was nicer than myspace in UI/UX. Google returned superior results. So their point stands. They have to be much better. And all of these were.
- smachiz 4y ago
  Yes, basically, when you stop innovating and are only doing incremental improvement, someone is going to come and eat your lunch.
KMnO4 4y ago
I think you confirmed what he was saying. All of those products that came after are better than the first movers. If Apple was worse than BB, do you think it would have won?
edgyquant 4y ago
Every single one of those things you just listed is an improvement in one or more ways (to the average user.) So I really don’t see your point at all

ladyattis 4y ago

I think second mover has a better chance to succeed, even from the first mover themselves (Apple had many ideas for touchscreen devices but most flopped until the 2000s). Iteration on a good enough device or platform will always give you more success than iterating on a false premise (ex. the metaverse).

maeln 4y ago

Telsa is a very good exemple because they just about got beaten off in every category (except maybe the driver assistance features). If you want a cheaper car with a smaller range than the model 3, but still decent, you can look at Volkswagen, Renault, Peugeot, Kia and Hyundai. If you want higher range (and premium/luxury feel) you can look at BMW/Audi/Mercedes. And pretty much all of them have better QC and a vaster maintenance network than Tesla (and in the E.U the charging network all use the same type of connector, so you are not tied to the manufacturer of your car). But still, whenever you talk electric car, people often talk first about Tesla and they have no problem selling them. This might mostly be true in the E.U though. Also the model 3 is still priced fairly well being in-between the higher-end of the market and the intermediate.

senko 4y ago

Tesla wasn't a first mover. Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt were both on the market roughtly 2 years before Model S. Also, you don't really need to beat Tesla if you just want to make (and sell) electric cars. Tesla doesn't fill every niche and is nowhere near enough in terms of volume to satisfy the EV demand. (If you want to be a bigger electric car company than Tesla then you have to beat Tesla, yeah -- that's a tautology, not an interesting observation tho).

fomine3 4y ago

Car manufacturer don't have to beat Tesla because it's not "winner takes all" market. Not good analogy.