
Why New Technology Is a Hard Sell - joeyespo
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/tech/
======
pron
Almost every technology was adopted at a rate commensurate with its
cost/benefit. The car _was_ widely adopted virtually overnight once it became
cheap enough (~1914). The airplane was in common military use less than a
decade after it was able to carry the first passenger. Useful technology is
rarely delayed by adoption; rather, adoption is often delayed by a
technology's maturity and cost. In fact, technology is so usually adopted so
quickly, that if _your_ technology isn't, it is almost always a sure sign that
either it isn't as helpful as you think or its cost is too high. The
statement, "It usually takes more time to convince people that your technology
has changed the world than it does to invent a world-changing technology" is
just not true. What is true is that it sometimes takes a while to make your
technology cheap/safe/easy enough for it to actually be worth it.

~~~
bjornsing
There’s a lot of room for survivorship bias in this rosy picture...

A classic counter example is how long it took for hand hygiene to be accepted
as an important aspect of medical practice. The cost was just about zero. The
benefit: thousands of human lives saved. Still took a hell of a long time.

~~~
nkoren
Survivorship bias is absolutely right. Technology adoption really doesn't work
that way.

Another example: scurvy. Known to be cured by lemons since 1601; took 200
years and the better part of two million lives for this news to be properly
disseminated.[1]

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy)

~~~
cdirkx
But that article mentions that lemons can only be stored a limited amount of
time, thus requiring restocking during long voyages. However the
infrastructure for that wasnt there yet, only those 200 years later it is
mentioned that "Spain's large empire and many ports of call made it easier to
acquire fresh fruit" and enabling the first long distance expedition without
scurvy.

Still looks partially like a cost/benefit thing (even though there were indeed
many doctors not believing lemons were the cure and instead prescribing "fizzy
drinks" with sulpheric acid).

------
mdorazio
One I think they're missing (though perhaps implicit in a couple of the
others) is "People are skeptical of new things that promise a lot." Many new
technologies have been oversold by the media and... salespeople, leading
people over time to generally be skeptical that a really new technology can
actually do all the things it promises. As a result, it takes time to convince
people that, for example, the dish washer really _is_ better than washing
dishes yourself and not just a gimmick to take more money out of your wallet.

In many cases, this skepticism is healthy because (as the article mentions in
the beginning), a lot of new tech is _not_ actually ready for primetime for
quite some time after it is invented.

~~~
seem_2211
Can't have a lot of engineering teams without salespeople or marketers though.

~~~
kgwxd
Can there be engineering teams with honest salespeople and marketers?

------
gampleman
Personally, I think this article is full of a kind of techno-utopianism. For
example with the smart phone revolution the technology has been deployed
extremely rapidly to billions (!) of people. In less than a generation we've
gone from nearly zero to people and in particular children (hey I pretty
commonly see infants with iPads positioned in front of their faces on the bus)
spending the majority of their waking life in front of these devices. And
because of this extreme speed of deployment we have no data on any long term
developmental effects of this. The little slivers of research on some of these
effects that we have do not look particularly great.

As such, I think we have the opposite problem from what the article suggests.
We happily approve and deploy many technologies and find out about the
environmental, health, mental and other hazards the hard way many years later.

------
libertine
The article seems a bit condescending towards "regular people", when in
reality the hardest, and most expensive, effort marketing wise is education.

To educate an audience is so expensive that one is better to place that
responsibility on governments, most of the times through the education system,
or other public services that make it mandatory/enforced.

A good example is the goddamn seat belt - a technological wonder that saved
millions, yet people have them right next to their shoulders and still today a
lot refuse/forget to use it, while being enforced by law in many countries.

That's why I think the article can be resumed to - educate people to change
their behavior is hard, expensive and can take a long time.

The most seamless tech adoption is the one unnoticed, where people don't
realize neither have opinions on it's usage. Or enforced, where
people/manufactureres are forced to adopt new technology.

~~~
Razengan
> _educating people to change their behavior is hard, expensive and can take a
> long time._

And on the other side, in order to sell products, people are often "educated"
into believing misinformation and myths that persist for generations:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot#Night_vision](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot#Night_vision)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond#Industry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond#Industry)

Or see the many vintage adverts glamorizing products and lifestyles that are
now considered hazards:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/vintageads/](https://old.reddit.com/r/vintageads/)

Some of them literally show doctors approving cigarettes:
[https://i.imgur.com/Pornn4E.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Pornn4E.jpg)

~~~
libertine
>in order to sell products, people are often "educated" into believing
misinformation and myths that persist for generations

You're correct, but like I said, it takes a lot of money and time (a bit
redundant since time is money, but it's important to stress the time window).

Such campaigns take years, with several ads being displayed with high
frequencies, with opinion leaders paid to advertise the product, product
placements, it's a long term game that the average company can't sustain.

Specially now that technology moves so fast.

What took decades to build, for example, with the cigarettes industry by using
ads, doctors, movies, tv shows, sponsorships, and many other forms of
advertising and media, also is taking years to reverse.

The vaping, e-cigarret industry is growing thanks to years of government
backed campaigns about the health issues related to cigarettes, with the
addition of new laws set in place to ban advertising and smoking indoors for
example.

So it's not like the new technology of vaping and e-cigarrets is making the
investment themselves to educate people, they are riding a wave. To make it
clear, it doesn't mean they are not investing, but that they aren't making the
massive investment to change people behavior.

------
ape4
Well for one.. It might be cool to have speaker in the kitchen to answer
queries but I don't want every conversation to be recorded.

------
dwheeler
There are other factors not mentioned in this article.

First, most technologies are challenging to use and expensive at first. There
are often related technologies that are required to make the first technology
actually be useful. For example indoor toilets are not really useful without
plungers.

The second problem is survivorship bias. People are rightly skeptical of new
technology, because most new technology turns out to be rather limited in its
uses, at least initially. It's easy to comment on the slow adoption of some
past technologies, because we can see their wide use later, yet we ignore all
the garbage that they were also trying to ignore. See
[https://xkcd.com/1827/](https://xkcd.com/1827/)

~~~
essayist
Peter Senge brought your first point to life for me:

 _The Wright brothers proved that powered flight was possible, but the
McDonnel Douglas DC3, introduced in 1935, ushered in the era of commercial air
travel. The DC3 was the first plane that supported itself economically as well
as aerodynamically...._

 _The DC-3, for the first time, brought together five critical component
technologies that formed a successful ensemble. They were: the variable-pitch
propeller, retractable landing gear, a type of lightweight molded body
construction called “monocque,” a radial air-cooled engine, and wing flaps. To
succeed, the DC3 needed all five; four were not enough. One year earlier, the
Boeing 247 was introduced with all of them except wing flaps. Boeing’s
engineers found that the plane, lacking wing flaps, was unstable on takeoff
and landing, and they had to downsize the engine._

[https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/163984/the-fifth-
dis...](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/163984/the-fifth-discipline-
by-peter-m-senge/9780385517256/excerpt)

------
tabtab
It is hard to tell fads from the real deal these days. There's rarely a Grand
New Idea with no downsides or tradeoffs, and those promoting such ideas
usually have an agenda. It's rational to let somebody else be the proverbial
guinea pig. As our systems become more complex, the tradeoffs are also more
complex such that the low-hanging-fruit of obvious benefits are mostly all
picked.

A folding (two-screened) phone sounds like a good idea in theory, but whether
they can be made reliable and if there is or will be enough useful software
for them is still unknown. I'll wait it out...

I waited out the 3D TV fad and am glad I did. My grumpy geezerism paid off
there.

------
Merrill
Innovation is easy if you can do it for yourself, by yourself, using stuff you
have.

That's a paraphrase of something in somebody's book. but it is really true. If
costs and benefits don't accrue to the same organization or individual, if
cooperation of multiple players is needed, and if some unobtainable component
or technical breakthrough is needed, then innovation is really hard.

------
nkoren
We're in the middle of a few different technological revolutions right now,
and the kind of conservatism / lock-in that this article talks about is very
much in evidence. It can be surreal to observe.

One revolution which I follow quite closely is in spaceflight. Since the
beginning, it had been done one way and one way only, and its way of doing
things had become a goal in itself. Its exorbitant cost was lauded for its
ability to create jobs and -- for more ambitious initiatives -- to foster
international collaboration, since surely it was too expensive for any one
nation to undertake on its own. Its resulting rarity and exclusivity created a
kind of mystique around rocket scientists and astronauts. This mystique and
these justifications became fundamental to the narrative of what spaceflight
was about.

Then SpaceX came along and screwed it all up, and practically nobody noticed.
"Bad example," you might say: "Elon Musk is fetishized by millions, and is
hardly out of the news cycle for more than a few minutes". Which is true, but
Musk's status as a celebrity is entirely orthogonal to actually comprehending
what he's doing, and adjusting one's model of the world accordingly.

What SpaceX has done/is doing, is this:

1\. Changed traditional aerospace engineering, management, and procurement
practices, so that they were more focused on efficiently building/operating
rockets than distributing work sites around a critical mass of congressional
districts. Nothing at all heroic or sexy about this, but it reduced launch
costs by a factor of 3 relative to the industry norm.

2\. Developed 1-stage reusability, which _is_ quite sexy, and reduced launch
costs by a factor of 6.

3\. Developed the Falcon Heavy, which reduced launch costs by a factor of 8
(for large enough payloads, of which there currently aren't any).

What I find remarkable about this is that although the sight of boosters
landing themselves has become common place enough to no longer grab headlines,
the industrial / political community is still very much at the "Do Not Think
Aeroplanes Will Ever Compete With Railroads" stage of comprehension. The fact
that it's made Musk into a celebrity is, frankly, totally meaningless and
facile. What's slightly more meaningful is that this has enabled a startup to
capture the majority of commercial launch services in the world, and make a
profit doing it. But ultimately, what a 8x reduction in the cost of
spaceflight _should_ do is change the the entire nature of the spaceflight
business: enable many new types of business cases and missions. This is a fait
accompli, but it's taking a long time for the world to catch onto this fact.

If you browse through an archive of traditional industry magazines and forums
and such, you'll find almost no mention of SpaceX's innovations apart from
dismissal and derision. Typical themes are:

1\. Private companies can't afford to develop launch vehicles. (Still being
claimed for a couple of years after they first reached orbit).

2\. SpaceX is losing money. (They're not.)

3\. SpaceX is only making money because they're subsidized by the government.
(They're not.)

4\. Recovering a booster is impossible.

5\. Reusing a booster is impossible. (This argument was still being made long
after SpaceX had started flying reused booster.)

6\. Rocket reusability will never be economically meaningful because [insert
painfully tortured and ridiculous argument here]. (Said after SpaceX had
captured the bulk of the world's launch services).

7\. Private companies can't develop heavy-lift launch vehicles. (Said as
recently as a congressional hearing last week, after the Falcon Heavy has been
successfully flying for almost two years)

8\. Look, astronauts should be the very best of the best of the best. We
shouldn't just allow anyone into space. (Said ever since the very first space
tourist booked a flight to the ISS in 2001).

The myopia here is really striking to me. But one thing I've noticed is that
-- contrary to the article -- it mostly _doesn 't_ really come from a too-
conservative Joe Public. Rather, it comes from well-regarded experts with a
vested interest in their world not being upended. When SpaceX first
successfully recovered a booster in late 2015, I found that my friends with no
particular interest in space were able to comprehend the significance of that
milestone far more accurately than executives from the old guard space
contractors. And I genuinely think that the old guard didn't comprehend. They
weren't publicly ignoring/rubbishing SpaceX, while privately doing intensive
R&D in an effort to catch up. Privately, they were doing nothing differently.
So they really didn't understand what they were seeing.

4 years later, they're _vaguely_ beginning to understand what has happened,
and starting to think about how they might catch up. The European Space Agency
is funding paper studies of reusable rockets which look almost exactly like
the Falcon 9. SpaceX's main US competitor, United Launch Alliance, is aiming
to start doing trials of partial reusability in 5 years. China is ahead of
both of them, already doing booster-recovery experiments very similar to the
early Falcon 9 recovery trials in 2013.

But this a terribly muted reaction to what has already been a significant
revolution in spaceflight. And anyhow, it is all going to be much too little,
much too late -- because actually the revolution was just getting started, and
matching the capabilities of the Falcon 9 is about to be the least of any
competitor's worries.

SpaceX is now developing the Starship, which will be fully reusable and
plausibly stands to reduce launch costs by a factor of 50-100 vs. the prior
industry baselines. This will be a mind-bogglingly huge development: at those
prices, asteroid mining is viable, and building Mars colonies is with reach of
many NGOs, never mind governments. At those prices, the fact that we live in a
solar system with almost unlimited resources starts to become a meaningful
statement. Once the culture has absorbed the fact that this is really
happening, I would expect to see thousands of people emigrating off-world
every year, to pursue the many opportunities elsewhere. This will be a BIG
DEAL.

And it's happening right now. Starship's engines have completed development
and are now being optimised for mass production. The first test-bed flew
earlier this year. The first full prototype vehicle is under construction and
will make its first trans-sonic flight as soon as _next month_. They expect to
hit orbit by next year. Musk is saying as early as next Spring -- and this is
undoubtedly too optimistic -- but at the pace they've been going, late next
year is absolutely plausible.

Moreover, "the pace they've been going" isn't a matter of speculative
kremlinology: they've been practically open-source about the whole endeavour,
with all the parts laid out in a field and assembled in full public view. As
if to try to convince the world: "hey, wake up, this is actually happening."

But so far, awareness of this seems to be largely confined to cult-of-Musk
fanboys, and their equal but opposite anti-fanboys. With very few exceptions,
few in the industry have noticed that this is actually happening. Based on
what I've seen with the Falcon series, I fully expect this state of denial to
persist for at least 5-10 years after Starship reaches orbit.

~~~
Gibbon1
I only have a passing interest in space stuff, but it's obvious to me that
SpaceX has ratfucked all big players. To me as neither a cult of Musk or an
anti-Musk guy is mostly what Musk did is allow existing engineering talent to
innovate. Which says that typical aerospace management is exceptionally
shitty.

~~~
nkoren
It's kind of worse than that: typical aerospace management is actually very
good at their game. They're just playing the wrong game.

This is part of the reason that it can take so long to comprehend a genuinely
innovative new technology: it doesn't win the game that's being played -- it
plays a different game entirely.

When airplanes came along, rail companies could quickly (and correctly!) judge
that they would never be hauling coal and cattle and such. Therefore:
airplanes are just a toy; we can safely ignore them.

Similarly, when television came along, the radio industry said: "people listen
to the radio when they are working, driving, or drifting off to sleep. You
can't do anything else when you're staring at a screen, so television isn't a
threat."

What these industries failed to realise is that while the the new technologies
were non-competitive on the use-cases that railways and radios had optimised
for, the new entrants could win on metrics that the old industry had never
thought to care about.

(All this is fairly standard Christensen disruptive-technology stuff, BTW.)

Anyhow, the thing about the legacy aerospace industry is this: they weren't
playing the "let's build and fly rockets" game. They were playing the "let's
maximise our funding" game. The rules of this game are as follows:

1\. Spend all the money you get, otherwise your budget will be cut next year.

2\. Spend _even more_ money than you get, and do as little as you can with it,
so that you can plead the necessity of a funding increase next year.

3\. The more money you get, the more of a political base you can establish.
The more of a political base you've established, the harder it will be to
cancel the whole program.

Underlying all of this is the axiomatic assumption that the spaceflight market
is essentially inelastic. Weather and positioning and communications and spy
satellites need to be launched at more or less any cost, but any reduction in
launch prices won't be matched by a corresponding increase in demand.
Therefore: if you cut costs, you're just leaving money on the table and
putting your political base at risk. Don't do it.

Typical aerospace management was playing this game _exceptionally_ well.
NASA's heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, has spent $14B last time I
looked, and is still years away from its first launch. Its launches will cost
a billion dollars apiece. That's actually not easy to accomplish. If I gave
you $14B and told you -- a person with only a passing interest in space stuff
-- that I wanted a heavy-lift rocket in return, I'm quite you could do it. All
you need to do is put out a tender for heavy-lift services, with payments made
on a milestone/per-launch basis. Award these to several teams to keep things
robust and competitive. Job done.

On the other hand, if I gave you $14B and told you to spend it on the
_appearance_ of serious rocket development work, I think you'd find it quite
challenging. Spending that money without flying a damned thing takes
_exceptional_ skill. Hats off to any program manager who can accomplish this!

But when SpaceX comes along and decides that the rules they want to play by
are "build and operate the most amount of rocket for the least amount of
money", the rest of the industry simply couldn't figure out WTF game SpaceX
was playing at. Most of the industry _still_ hasn't figured it out.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
They're different markets with different motivations. SpaceX is in the get-
shit-done market. Musk personally wants to get off Earth ASAP.

NASA's contractors are in the corporate pork market. They're strongly
incentivised _not_ to get shit done.

But this is no different to the equivalent in the private sector - especially
B2B software, where the game is about locking corporate customers into
insanely exploitative contracts while providing a service that mostly sort-of
works, more or less.

This a solvable problem in at least certain circumstances. Kennedy fixed it
problem in the 60s by giving NASA (+contractors) a deadline and by framing the
project as a patriotic race. Under those conditions they did at least as well
- possibly better - than SpaceX is doing today.

It would be harder to do the same today in aerospace because the political
conditions are so different.

None of this has anything to do with some vague handwaving about "resistance
to technology." Most people are just fine with new technology, as long as it
doesn't blow up in their faces - literally or otherwise - and offers real and
obvious benefits.

What they're not fine with is being sold crap that doesn't work and makes
their lives harder. And IT has always been a mix of good stuff with a lot of
crapware tagging along for the ride.

------
roel_v
I don't think you can compare a vaccine with, say, cars. A vaccine works or it
doesn't, there isn't much to be improved on from a usability point of view.
Whereas the very first car compared to models, say, 20 years later - that's
quite a difference. I wouldn't want a car for which I needed to study 6 months
to learn how it works, so that I could fix it on the road every time it breaks
down. Not to mention costs going down over time.

~~~
ensiferum
Do you have a modern car ? How long do you think it'd require you to come up
with the tools and knowledge to fix it if it broke down on you?

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Depends what breaks. Most of the failures the HN crowd is going to encounter
can be fixed with a $30 socket and wrench set, another $30 in hand tools and
an internet connection.

The overwhelming majority of those are going to be worn out wear items that
only require an ability to follow instructions to rectify. Most of the rest
will be plumbing failures (if your definition of plumbing is inclusive enough
to include plumbing for electrons) which will require pliers and other "grabby
pinchy tools" in addition to your $30 socket set.

~~~
jfengel
Increasingly, even that is going to become rare. There are very few user
serviceable parts in an electric vehicle. The thing is practically solid
state. I heard one count that there were 21 moving parts. I imagine that they
can only be replaced by a pro, but that they basically won't ever need to be.

I guess the headlamps might need to be replaced some day... but if they're
LEDs, they may well be permanent.

------
hevi_jos
The article contradicts itself.

It starts with polio vaccine, which was an amazing product that people needed.
It as not a hard sell at all, lots of people died because of polio.

Then he puts the counterexample with penicillin and says it took 20 years to
sell.

But it is wrong in the sense that it took 20 years in developing the
industrial process that made penicillin cheap. Not because people did not want
it, but because it was a real hard problem to solve.

I read years ago a book about the history of Penicillin and there were
tremendous technical roadblocks that made the industrial production of it a
chimera(until they were solved). I believe they won the novel price for
solving this technical roadblocks(the industrial process, not just the
discovery).

You can't analyze it backwards, from the point when all these roadblocks were
solved and say, hey! people did no like it!

The equivalent today is nuclear fusion. It has technical roadblocks that makes
it a chimera until they are solved. It is not that people do not want nuclear
fusion, it is that they doubt scientist will solve the roadblocks so financing
is very weak.

The real problem is that nobody(or very few) believe in what does not exist,
what they can not see. In the Bible it is called "Faith". Innovation is by
definition creating something that did not exist before.

Innovation needs people that could see the future as real, even when it does
not exist yet. They are called visionaries, and are highly problematic people.
Most people can't understand them, because they are dreamers, "pie in the sky"
people.

By the way, most of those visionaries are wrong in their visions, and consume
the wealth of those from the "real world" that trust them. 9 out of 10.

In fact, for a long time inventors were considered "Snake oil" salespeople,
scammers.

The only difference is that today failing 9 times out of 10 is considered
normal business and VCs approach it like a numbers game: They know the 1 out
of 10 that success will pay for the failures.

The article makes a wrong assumption: That technologies are fixed and
finished, you sell them and people do not want them.

But that is not the case, technologies evolve continuously: Take lithium
batteries:They have been improving 7% a year, looks like nothing but it is
exponential change, you see 10 years, 15 and the product is completely
different.

I bought a RepRap machine when 3d printers patents expired. It was crap,
nothing to do with RepRap machines today once 300.000 or more printers have
been sold, and in the future when millions of 3d printers are sold the change
will accelerate more, because more people will use and modify their printers.

Electric cars, solar panels, wind energy technologies evolve. When they are
mass produced, prices get cheaper, as they get cheaper, more people want it,
as there is bigger market, more companies invest in R&D, and technologies
improve more.

