There's Zero Motorcycles if anyone wants an electric motorcycle. Well received by a number of long time motorcyclists. Starting from $11k.
http://www.zeromotorcycles.com/
http://www.zeromotorcycles.com/
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Electric Motorcycle Startup Mission Motors Ceases Operations After Losing Talent to Apple
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sorry to single you out, but the resistance to change and the cherry picking of arguments and stating them as true in the comments of macrumors is becoming more and more apparent. Maybe it's my "evangelism" getting in the way, but...
Filling a car at a gas station is annoying. As are keys. And exhausts. etc... While there are some issues to overcome, getting in a fully charged car every morning is way, way more convenient than going to gas stations. And that's without even considering environmental and geopolitic situations (it would be a good idea to stop funding saudi's and isis, for example). Culture shifts are a low price to pay for the advantages... (most culture shifts are not a big deal btw, look at faxes, paper, copying, phone industry).
The key players who got picked by Apple knew the project was going to fail.
I'm sure these guys were paid anywhere from 50-90k annual salary to make maybe 90-120k at Apple.
If this electric bike had any momentum and the CEO offered profit sharing to key players you'd have the potential of making millions within 5 years. Something Apple wouldn't have got you.
It wasn't unethical 10 years ago either. Absent a nin compete employement at will meansxeither party can end the employment whenever they chose.
Oh, I'd LOVE to talk about how lucky the engineers were to eject from a crashing plane...
What I will NOT do is pretend with you that this startup failed, because of Apple, which is what the sensationalist article title suggests, but even the most cursory perusing of the actual article, puts to rest.
So hiring talented engineers from a company circling the toilet is unethical?
And this, ladies and gentleman, is a perfect example of the horrors of "opoly" whether it is oligopoly, monopoly, or in this case, the great Google/Apple duopoly.
Any new tech that is being developed that might be amazing, is bought up by one of the two companies, and either killed, or used to squeeze extra cash out of Jane Q Public.
It is why congress passed a law against monopolies in the late 1800s against it. Even in the 1600s and 1700s great thinkers of the time knew the opolies sucked the life blood out of the people, going all the way back to the days of the invisible hand.
Congress is supposed to break this stuff up as economically the public benefits far more in the long run from opolies being split up into smaller pieces. Congress hasn't done it's job since the turn of the last century.
Real capitalism requires real competition. We haven't had real capitalism in decades now.
Every-time I think of a secret automotive whatever, i usually think of "here's a nice shack out in the middle of nowhere, now work on this"
Very similar to what intel does with BIOS code design back in the day. Basically a place to keep themselves occupied.
Very similar to what intel does with BIOS code design back in the day. Basically a place to keep themselves occupied.
I think you need to go back and look at the stuff Microsoft pulled in the 1990s.
Please read my post more properly. That is not what I said. I said that in general it can be a problem for small startups when a large giant pulls away key personnel. At no point did I say that Apple killed this particular company.
Why are you so aggressive?
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Shame but hopefully Apple does something good. Personally Elon should take over as CEO and make Apple great again!
While I do agree with you that Mission Motors has benn basicaly floating dead since mid 2014 (and not because of key people leaving but because the product wasn't any good and management plainly sucked) I think the quote you are reffering to was about general business ethics (backed with the A123 example)...not so much about mission motors...
You grossly misinterpret what is going on here. What is happening here is the ESSENCE of capitalism. It is the free movement of money and people. Any regulation or restriction on hiring practices is in fact a measure to diminish capitalism.
None of the involved people were forced to leave the company to go to Apple and none of them would have if their company was in fact promising. Also the assertion that there is a duopoly with Google and Apple is clear nonsense. You need to take a far better look at the companies and their markets to be able to make a call on that. In each of the markets that Google and Apple play in they are accompanied by a host of others that are quite successful in taking market share (only calling out major players here):
Hardware: Samsung, LG, HTC, Logitech, HP, Lenovo etc.
Software: Microsoft, Adobe, open source
Music: Spotify, Rdio
Movies / TV: HBO, Netflix, Amazon
Data services: Amazon, Dropbox, Microsoft
Both Apple and Google are far removed from being monopolies and are actually seeing increased competition in most of their markets. Hence why they jump into new markets such as cars, health and others. True xxxopolists stay in their market because there is no incentive to move and the market remains theirs.
Last but not least it is common accepted practice that personell and technology get bought or transfer to other companies. Some companies choose to stay independent and become big on their own and stay on their own such as Dropbox. These companies are in the minority, because at the end of the day management of those companies are all true capitalists and big money is irresistible. With all the trouble Dropbox has in competing with the others I'm sure its management wishes that they would have taken the offer a few years ago, when the door was still open.
Well you did single me out, but I'm not exactly sure you've understood the issue.
Sure, you've mentioned areas of the generally current day car owning paradigm that could be deemed as 'annoying' (I'm not sure anyone really considers a key ignoring even if more cars are going RF tag equipped - i.e. 'keyless') but whatever you think my point was, it wasn't that. The points aren't 'cherry picked', other than to say that whatever the individual technical points happen to be, it always comes down to practicality and usability (whatever the product is).
There's very little point buying an electric car that uses the battery technology that we're used to because it is totally limited in range, unless you're willing to stop when the battery runs out and endure a very significant and inconvenient wait while your car recharges itself from a charging station (assuming you can find one). Conventional batteries take forever to recharge. Unless you live in a city and only do reasonably short journeys to and from places with charging infrastructure already in place, your car is a very expensive white elephant.
There is, however, a way round this, and that's to develop a car that can be recharged in an intuitive and quick way and where there already exists a logistics infrastructure that can cope with it. Flow cell technology uses two sets of replaceable fluid electrolytes which, when passed by each other across an impermeable membrane, produce current. Naturally these electrolytes get used up, but the good thing is that they can be pumped out of a storage tank and replaced. Quickly. With only minor changes to forecourt pumps (and, probably, with the encouragement of government through tax regimes) we could enable the wholesale adoption of electrically powered cars that didn't have range worries and didn't have the pollution issues (particularly if the recycling and reuse of the 'spent' electrolytes could be done using renewable energy). Furthermore, it might even be possible for filling stations to recharge/recycle 'spent' electrolytes on the spot (perhaps using solar power cells fitted on the filling station roof, they're generally big enough, after all).
My point is that electric cars are never going to take off in a widespread way because without the ability to replenish one's energy supply on board the car in less than 5 minutes, people who want the opportunity to use their cars to travel long distances simply aren't going to buy them when a fossil fuel powered vehicle affords them the ability to do so without stopping for several hours every 2-300 miles or so. (Some people might have two cars for different purposes, but then that's an option only really available to the rich.)
I don't know how all of this is 'cherry picking' an argument, as you put it. It's simply reflecting realities in the world that have to be overcome. I'm very much in favour of electrically powered vehicles, but the reality is that electricity is not going to be the dominant form of motive power until and unless it becomes as convenient to use in day to day terms as the gasoline/petrol powered engine. I've proffered a suggestion. I hope it's the one that Apple - and others - see is the right answer.
You picked the range anxiety/slow recharge argument, and state it als the true reason the adoption of electric cars fall behind. While i recognize that people are stating it as reason not to buy one, I don't believe it's a reason the cars don't get wide spread. I also don't think electric cars fall behind in popularity at all.
We're simply in the early adoption stage.
That said; you only picked one argument and I reacted with the annoyance of many others, sorry about that. Oh and also; the electrolyte recharging sounds like an ok solution, for the long range travelers.
Microsoft, in the day, was ruthless. Heck, from the start, Bill Gates reportedly stole the BASIC that he was selling to people, because the original developers were giving it away.
The collusion, the manipulation, the back door meetings, the 'tours' of competitors that resulted in Microsoft doing their own competing product. The whole Netscape browser war is just the basics. The end of that lawsuit was far more to do with politics than merits... Microsoft wagged the industry for decades.
If Apple were like Microsoft, EVERYBODY would be running OS X, and the huge list of 'compatible' hardware manufacturers would be down to a scant few, clinging to that 'archaic mess' called 'Windows'.
Maybe I am getting old, but the quieter the machines the better. I hate noise pollution
Let's be honest. If it had been Microsoft, you wouldn't have written that.HOW DARE ANYONE PICK TO GO TO A COMPANY WILLING TO PAY THEM A HIGHER WAGE AND OFFER THEM MORE OPPORTUNITIES! THE NERVE OF SUCH PEOPLE.
So, do you realize what you are saying?
An engineer is tied to the company. Not unlike a capstan in a sailing ship. They won't be able to leave EVER.
That kind of logic, is hard to call logic. People move from job to job, and from corporation to corporation. Laws to prohibit that have largely been shot down as being illegal and unconstitutional.
From the history that I posted upstream on the company, it looks like they became 'all smoke and no fire' pretty quickly. They were apparently surviving on VC funds, and apparently had no real marketable product themselves, but a lot of 'LOOK AT THIS! It'll be available in a few months' only to have the product not materialize (At least twice!).
Sounds like a waste of a good engineer's time, and they got out before the gunwales dipped below the waves. I can't blame them. I jumped from a compay early in my career as a human. They had no clue what they were doing, and suppliers were getting tired on the late payments, and I just sensed things were about to go 'tits up', and they did... Was I wrong? Should I have stuck it out to the bitter end, and had my paychecks start bouncing?
ANY engineer worth their weight in salt would hopefully see the possibility of a good future, and stay.