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That bit also caught my eye, yet I think the point stills hold true given the following constraints. Even though this food synthesiser is incredibly cheap to p

That bit also caught my eye, yet I think the point stills hold true given the following constraints. Even though this food synthesiser is incredibly cheap to produce it needs some sort of source of molecules to produce its goods, think of it as a cartridge. In the beginning to attain a sizeable market share the cartridge cost can be amortised. Once the goal is achieved the company can sell it for whatever it wants. It's true that other companies could see an opportunity there, and develop competing synthesisers. But, they could be easily driven out of the market by legal costs when the original company uses its enormous corpus of meaningless patents to sue them. These constraints can be seen today at play with devastating results for innovators and consumers.

mseebach 11y ago
TFA's scary scenario assumes a number of things that just aren't, and empirically won't be, true. In no industry, ever, has an inventor with however many patents succeeded in permanently keeping substitutions away for more than a very short period of time. You mention cartridges with brings to mind famously uncompetitive coffee and printer toner parallels. Yet, there is a rich market for third party toner cartridges that the incumbents has totally failed to shut down, and there's a rich market for different brands of printers, which even in the face of uncompetitive cartridges caps the price any one manufacturer can charge. Despite the popularity of printers, HP is NOT a healthy company. Pretty much the same thing is true for the capsule-coffee-market. There are a ton of different kinds of cartridge/pad/pod/foo systems, and again, it's trivial to find third-party capsules. On top of that, the capsule-coffee-market is under pressure from the non-capsule coffee market: If you feel ripped off by capsules, you have a good number of options to brew beans direct. The same thing will happen with the magic food machine - people will just cook regular meals. Sure, the 5 star restaurant experience might be hurt , and that's a real shame, but it's not like a silicon valley whizkid can just charge $INF because otherwise humanity starves.

mseebach 11y ago

TFA's scary scenario assumes a number of things that just aren't, and empirically won't be, true. In no industry, ever, has an inventor with however many patents succeeded in permanently keeping substitutions away for more than a very short period of time. You mention cartridges with brings to mind famously uncompetitive coffee and printer toner parallels. Yet, there is a rich market for third party toner cartridges that the incumbents has totally failed to shut down, and there's a rich market for different brands of printers, which even in the face of uncompetitive cartridges caps the price any one manufacturer can charge. Despite the popularity of printers, HP is NOT a healthy company. Pretty much the same thing is true for the capsule-coffee-market. There are a ton of different kinds of cartridge/pad/pod/foo systems, and again, it's trivial to find third-party capsules. On top of that, the capsule-coffee-market is under pressure from the non-capsule coffee market: If you feel ripped off by capsules, you have a good number of options to brew beans direct. The same thing will happen with the magic food machine - people will just cook regular meals. Sure, the 5 star restaurant experience might be hurt , and that's a real shame, but it's not like a silicon valley whizkid can just charge $INF because otherwise humanity starves.