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      12-08-2020, 06:07 PM   #193
GrussGott
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Efthreeoh View Post
You don't understand the depth of the commerical, non-passenger drone flight market.
Probably not, I rely on publicly available data and some private data services, so if it's more secret than that, I wouldn't see it.

It sounds like we've been conflating 2 points:

(1.) Is/will commercial, non-passenger flight drones be a good business?
(2.) Will that business dip enough beaks to impact regulation speed?


(1.) Is/will commercial, non-passenger flight drones be a good business?
Unless you have better info to share, objectively, yeah, looks like a nice business, with lots of growth, though the data is all over the place with all kinds of estimates, but the use-cases seem solid (engineering, security, farming, etc) and there's lots of investment by tons of companies and venture both large and small.

That said, still seems arm-wavy to me in many industries - e.g., security seems solid, but will there really be ROI in farming or engineering? And if so, at what level of use? Speciality or widespread? and in all of these cases there are less desirable existing alternatives ... If you have answers, I'd love to hear them!

And, since you've encouraged me, here's an example of global market size & investment estimates out there on the webs - if you have better, post up!:




So, as you said, most definitely a good business today, likely growing fast, and lots of investment! But ...


(2.) Will that business / investment dip enough beaks to impact regulatory speed?

Much harder question to answer ... the question there would be how widespread is the impact and what government contracts? Seems like it could be large, but even that might not be enough because there's already solutions to these problems: whatever they're doing today. Businesswise that's important, because it means *there's no real urgency*, at least not yet that I see, which means no need to rush regulatory reform.

Comparatively, the thing I worked on with the FAA, military, and civil aviation *replaced* existing operations - meaning a date was set and everything had to be in place by that date or no money. Delivering revenue on date X with no turning back is a big motivator. So in that case dollars+deadline=delivery

Further, something like SpaceX is in the same place: once the military contracts are signed, there's no turning back *and there's no alternative*

So you tell me:
Are there contracts like this in the commercial UAV market? I might speculate border patrol and building security, however both of those have less desirable but available alternatives: foot patrols. So it would seem $ may be there, but urgency and deadlines aren't.


And bringing this all back around to Tesla
Once Tesla's battery factories with their proprietary technology come online, it's quite feasible the batteries in all of these UAVs will be made by Tesla ... as well as the firmware and possibly the energy management system. And now multiply that across every product that uses rechargeable batteries.

Which is why I've been saying since 2018:

Tesla is tech company - they build energy storage & management software and they're using auto sales to fund development of their technology, and eventually that technology will be in most things with a battery which eventually will be most powered things. Thus their stock price.

And we've seen this movie before with Amazon - in the 90s they were derided as a shitty book retailer with slow fulfillment who didn't make a profit. People didn't recognize they were a retail logistics management software company using book sales to fund development of their technology. Not only did they take over retail, but cloud: on the amazon site each retail category next to the search box was managed as its own product with its own dev team and they need a way to integrate all that code, so they developed tools to do it and AWS was born. Last week they announced sale of "Monitron", a commercial product based on their in-house software that manages their warehouses. As Amazon continues to develop logistics management software they'll use it to dominate retail and also sell it commercially.

And with Google - In the 90s Google was derided as a featureless search engine company without even an internet directory like Yahoo had. People didn't realize they were a 2-sided network online advertising management software company using search to deliver the 3rd side of their value chain, i.e., people who want to place ads, people who want ads on their online property, and search to attract consumers searching for stuff to buy.

And with Apple - iPhones, 'nuff said. Took 2 tries though, anyone remember the Newton from the early 90s?



And this software-consumes-industries model isn't new - it more/less started in insurance on the 70s, especially health insurance (claims adjudication, revenue cycle management, payment integrity, etc) - at a certain size, like Amazon, Google, and soon Tesla, a large insurance company can start selling their in-house software externally even while they consume their originating market and industry ... once consumed they move on to other markets & industries (e.g., Amazon uses movies/music like Google uses search: to attract customers to retail, so they don't need to make a dime in the entertainment industry)

The trick is, it requires unique leaders who build a unique culture: strong top-down leadership modeled daily by the leader. E.g., both Bezos and Elon (and Jobs) *HATE* meetings ("meetings are what people do when they're not working", 2 pizza rule, etc) and drive high productivity cultures with zero ambiguity of mission, purpose, or goals. Everybody shows up every day knowing exactly what they have to do and they're individually and uniquely empowered to do it.

VAG's 3 day, 31 exec "Mission T" meeting to catch up to Tesla is a great example of why they'll never catch up to Tesla. That meeting alone probably took 100s of VAG staff offline to prepare, and will result in very slow changes if any. While they were doing that, 100s of Tesla employees were designing the next evolution of battery technology.

I'm thinking Porsche and Tesla eventually merge with Tesla being the volume/value play and Porsche being luxury/brand play. (no, Tesla won't "buy" Porsche because as Porsche showed us with VAG, if anyone's doing the buying, it's Porsche, but they don't need to advertise that fact).
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Originally Posted by TurtleBoy View Post
He tries to draw people into inane arguments, some weird pastime of his.

Last edited by GrussGott; 12-08-2020 at 06:51 PM..
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