Incandescent light bulbs in special applications, or in communist countries

Factual Questions
41

As I recall, the GM EV1electric car was scrapped because it was uneconomical; it was a proof of concept, and they made enough of them to verify some of the ideas. I think we forget how just plain bad battery tech would have been in 1996. Anyone who owned a laptop or other device from that era can attest to that. Rechargeable batteries from those days were short life, prone to failure, and expensive. GM only leased the vehicles, and then refused to renew the leases because they would start to cost real money to fix the batteries after a few years.

By 2008 when Tesla came up with their first car, the tech had accelerated by leaps and bounds. Apple had reached the point in the early 2000’s where they could confidently embed a battery in a device with no provision for replacement or swapping. If GM had stuck with it, they could have produced an EV by then, but ICE vehicles were simpler and more profitable. now that the government is installing a charging network, GM is giving it another try.

42

While I agree with what you’re saying in general, the above is rather disingenuous cherry-picking. Production of the Chevrolet Bolt models was halted in September because of a battery issue, so they built only 25 of them in Q4, plus one symbolic Hummer. For the first 3 quarters of 2021, they did produce over 24000 Bolts… which is still a tiny percentage of their overall deliveries. Details here.

43

Well, clearly GM are having problems with their EV production and it is a perhaps unfair to compare their performance with an EV only manufacturer like Tesla. Also 2021 has been an exceptional year with Covid and the chip famine. So let us look at VW.

VW delivered 4.8million passenger vehicles in 2021.
They managed 263,000 EVs and 106,000 hybrids

GM made 2.2million
24,000 EVs in 2021

These companies made a huge mistake by relying on their dubious tactical methods for preserving their market position and they failed to understand that motor manufacturing was approaching a technical inflexion point as battery technology developed and made it possible to use an electric power train in motor vehicles.

VW have been fined $34billion so far and have bet the farm on migrating their assembly plants to EV production. GM and the other big auto manufacturers have been very slow to get the message and change their strategy. GM in particular had an early EV manufacturing lead and decided to trash it. That decision will cost them many billions and they face a lot of competition from new volume EV manufacturers. They will get there, eventually.

Traditional auto makers seem to be deeply conservative companies that will dismiss or suppress innovation if it threatens their business.

The same is true of the Financial sector, they struggle with applying the distributed Blockchain and microservices technologies rather than the centralised technologies that they have long invested in.
The pity is that within these big organisations there are some fine engineers and some great innovations. But they rarely get the chance to put them into practice. This is no doubt, part of the reason for Elon Musk’s success. He has attracted the best engineers in the auto business and allowd them to innovate.

Change has to come from outsiders who are unencumbered by institutionalised thinking and huge sunk assets that make change very expensive.

Edison, a great innovator and a large figure in the early development of the light bulb, was not averse to tricks to convince investors and dubious practices to undermine competition.

The early stages of any technology seem to be full of people making bold claims and that is reflection on the need to convince investors in a capitalist, market driven economy.

There have been some notable frauds that have taken in people who you would have thought would know better. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind.

This kind of suggests that ‘sticking with what you know’ is a better policy that betting on some inspired innovator with a big bold idea.

The truth is somewhere between the extremes. Some companies try to find this balance and keep their options open to innovation. But that is always an internal battle. We tend to only hear about the mistakes and disasters, the heroes and villains.

I am now looking at my lightbulb, wondering whether anyone has made a 78mm Halogen linear bulb 60wat equivalent made with LEDs that is dimmable and does not look like an ugly oversized stick of corn.

Sometimes you have to wait a while until the technology catches up with your requirements.

44

If you’ve ever seen European gas prices, EV’s make more sense there. Plus, driving distances tend to be shorter and train travel is practical for longer cross-country. No surprise VW is ahead of GM.

Yes, large organizations with established businesses suffer from inertia. I type this on a PC evolved from the IBM PC, but IBM stopped being the leader for PC’s almost immediately. The story goes that their mid-range people saw the AT running a 286 at 12MHz and said “you can’t sell that for $7,000 it will cut into our AS400 business and those sell for hundreds of thousands!” Even the fact that a PC could be built from off-the-shelf parts was a byproduct of how little the top brass cared about the PC business.

Same with digital cameras - Kodak was the leader in photography in North America. Xerox was the inventory of Xerography, how many laser printers are Xerox outside of the high end market? (I like to point out to the gullible, Xerox was the Greek god of reproduction…)

45

Yes, he demanded feline sacrifice. Hence our word “copycat”

46

:blush: :sunglasses: :blush:

47

Usually, in this point in the conversation, I also point out additional Greek trivia, the plural of “fax” is “feces”.

48

VW had got a very big kick up the back side from the massive fines imposed by public authorities in all their international markets.

GM has a very cosy relationship with Big government and the current US administration sings their praises as a pioneer of the EV. When you have the politicians in your pocket, you can afford to take things slow and easy. They will end up losing their market to the slew of high volume Chinese manufacturers tooling up to enter the volume EV market in the next few years.

Xerox Parc was a famously productive research organisation. They pioneered a lot of the computer interface you are using now. They invented the windows the desktop metaphor and the mouse! Xerox also famously failed to see the potential and left it to other companies to develop the ideas.

Eventually some of the researchers left to work at Apple.

The computer business, dominated by IBM, was famously stuck in a groove selling big computers to big companies. They created a corporate grade personal computer and then famously lost the opportunity to capitalise on it, but gave Bill Gates the break he needed.

Working for these companies as an engineer with innovative ideas must be a dispiriting and frustrating experience.

Keeping markets fit and encouraging fair competition is an important responsibility of government. Sometimes they let one player dominate a market completely and effectively create a private monopoly. The Standard Oil monopoly that made Rockefeller the richest man in the world is the famous example. Cartels work the same way with a group of companies secretly agreeing to carve up a market and faking competition.

Eventually these companies lose their market when the technology changes, they ignore the signs new, more innovative competitors come to eat their lunch. These days markets are global and so is capital. If the market is controlled in one place, you can move to another where the conditions are better.

The early days of the motion picture business was once controlled by Edison’s patents. He used these ruthlessly drive out competition. He was not adverse to patent trolling. His competitors decided to get away from him and decamped to California and founded Hollywood.

I am pretty sure that if there was a real innovation to be made with respect to the light bulb, it would have appeared somewhere. Far from the lawsuits and sharp practice of the cartels.

It is no surprise that China quickly developed its own patent system and the way it operates is a constant bone of contention with the US and other countries.

China is politically controlled by the Communist Party but its industry and business has all the characteristics of a market driven capitalist system oriented towards volume manufacturing for a global market.

Auto manufacturers are going to face some intense competition because of their slowness in migrating to an electric drive chain. It will be like the entry of Japan and later South Korea into auto market all over again.

However, US customers have a penchant for the larger vehicle and gas guzzling is not yet as serious a concern as it is in other countries. It may take a while for a Chinese competitor to a Hummer to appear on the market. So GM is safe for a few years yet…

…a quick google of ‘chinese hummer’ seems to suggest I am very much mistaken.

49

IME, the notions of ‘agility’ (ie, ability to respond quickly to extrinsic changes that affect your business) and longevity (ie, a business that stands the test of time) are often at odds.

It can be very challenging to remain agile as companies that seek to implement process batten down the proverbial hatches.

My last gig was at an e-commerce company. In my early days there, we were incredibly agile. When something needed changing, I could – literally – stand over the shoulders of IT people, and get them to make fairly significant changes to the live servers on the fly … as I walked them through what was needed.

Which is anathema to most good practices, and often at odds with sustainability (involving endless documentation and coding that’s rather immediately intelligible to another looking at it).

There are no end of companies that got too institutionalized, too deep into the “100-year brand” mindset, too into process, documentation, redundancy, etc. When the wind shifted even a tiny bit, they were in trouble, and often – as you say – tried to manage consumer expectations because that actually was easier than turning the intransigent behemoth that they had created.

But I suspect a surprising number of enterprises fail because they never get past Full Agile Mode, and – particularly as their business grows – they simply don’t have processes or infrastructure to scale.

When the ‘long-term’ types came in, and the cowboys transitioned out to their next Wild West gig … the new folks always derided the cowboys horribly.

But the cowboys built that business … and so many others.

It’s just another significant ‘feel’ (think: old-school safe-cracker) that corporate execs have to master in order to make it all work.