Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote: In that light, it sounds smart to me to stay as small and [quiet] as > possible until the product is perfected and competitively unbeatable. >
No, not in most cases. The Wrights tried that from 1903 to 1907. They nearly lost their competitive advantage. Others were catching up with them. Another year with that strategy and they might have been forgotten. I doubt they would have made any money. That is what their supporters and investors were telling them. To some extent they were forced to "go public" as we would say nowadays. I believe Rossi may be responding to pressure from his investors to loosen his control over the machines, allow independent tests and independent production. Perhaps he is responding to inducements rather than pressure. Anyway my point is that he would not have investors, and they would not be pushing him, if he had not gone somewhat public in the past. You would not see companies like NI getting involved if everyone took the low profile approach. Generally speaking I think it is better to be too open and too public rather than too secretive. I think more high-tech ventures have been destroyed by excessive secrecy than excessive exposure. Edison and Jobs succeeded partly because they were masters at public relations, making people excited about their breakthroughs, and bringing the public to their side. Edison probably put on the best example of this in history. After 1879 he began to succeed with a practical incandescent light. He began to fabricate light bulbs that lasted for hours and then days, that could be wired in parallel. Naturally, his rivals and many expert professors came down on him like a ton of bricks, claiming he was "a fraud upon the public" that such a thing is impossible that Edison is once again making outrageous claims, etc. etc. It was "a conspicuous failure, trumpeted as a wonderful success." The Scientific American -- naturally! -- tried to play both sides, published a letter saying it would be, "almost a public calamity if Mr. Edison should employ his great talent on such a puerility." The Mary Yugos of 1880 were no different than our Mary is today. You can practically substitute her words for theirs. Benjamin Franklin also described these people to a "T" in his essays about what he went through after discovering many fundamental facts about electricity. Anyway, Edison responded to these nitwits in the winter of 1880 by stringing up lights around his workshop in New Jersey. People began to come and look in the evenings. Crowds came. More crowds. The railroads had to run special unscheduled trains to accommodate the crowds. Edison literally showed the world that he had succeeded. Actually, to establish that with assurance you would have to go behind the scenes and look at his generators, meters, wiring systems and you would have to verify that the lights were connected in parallel and not serial. In other words this was a demonstration rather than a test. Like Defkalion's demonstration it did not actually prove anything but it impressed everyone including experts, and especially untutored members of the public. Edison then got whatever he wanted from investors and the public. He wanted -- and needed -- a lot! To start with, he got a license to dig up lower Manhattan, irritating the most powerful people on earth, and disrupting their offices. Plus he needed barrels of money because he was never the kind of guy who worried about expenses. He faced a tremendous task installing the first lighting systems. What happened in the next few years is breathtaking in scope and sheer genius. It took *audacity* on a scale that would make Napoleon blush. See the book "Empire of Light" for details. If Rossi or Defkalion are to succeed they will have to pull off something even more astounding. They must overcome more opposition, and work on a grander scale. I do not see how they can do this without massive support from the public. The kind of support that Edison (and Jobs) managed to drum up by force of personality and by the genius of their breakthroughs, and by extraordinary public relations skills and manipulation of opinion. So far, Rossi and Defkalion have not exhibited much skill in these areas, in my opinion. - Jed
