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Alan Boyle writes that over the years, Elon Musk's showmanship, straight-ahead smarts and far-out ideas have earned him a following that spans the geek spectrum — to the point that some observers see glimmers of the aura that once surrounded Apple's Steve Jobs. "To me, it feels like he's the most obvious inheritor of Steve Jobs' mantle," says Ashlee Vance who's writing a biography of Musk that at one time had the working title "The Iron Man." "Obviously, Steve Jobs' products changed the world ... [But] if Elon's right about all these things that he's after, his products should ultimately be more meaningful than what Jobs came up with. He's the guy doing the most concrete stuff about global warming."
So what is Musk's vision? What motivates Musk at the deepest level? "It's his Mars thing," says Vance. Inspired in part by the novels of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, Musk has come around to the view that humanity's long-term future depends on extending its reach beyond Earth, starting with colonies on Mars. Other notables like physicist Stephen Hawking have laid out similar scenarios — but Musk is actually doing something to turn those interplanetary dreams into a reality. Vance thinks that Musk is on the verge of breaking out from geek guru status to a level of mass-market recognition that's truly on a par with the late Steve Jobs. Additions to the Tesla automotive line, plus the multibillion-dollar promise of Tesla's battery-producing "gigafactory" in Nevada, could push Musk over the edge. "Tesla, as a brand, really does seem to have captured the public's imagination. ... All of a sudden he's got a hip product that looks great, and it's creating jobs. The next level feels like it's got to be that third-generation, blockbuster mainstream product. The story is not done."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by idetuxs on Tuesday October 14 2014, @12:03AM
It's amazing that you can watch someone with resources thinking long-term and trying to make the world better. THIS [teslamotors.com] is inspiring. Would anyone expect something like this from Apple?
So still don't know if is pure hype, but I know that Musk already did some good actions and it's not all chatty-talk.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Tuesday October 14 2014, @12:19AM
I was going to say the same thing about the patents. That probably did more public good than most will *ever* do. Musk seems to be trying to solve the big, hard problems, and doesn't seem driven by greed. It's quite nice to see. When the time comes for me to buy a new car, Tesla will get serious consideration.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 14 2014, @04:11PM
They do compare. Jobs brought us smartphones; he (and Apple) didn't invent them, but they made the first one that was easy to use, didn't use a stupid stylus, and had broad appeal, and really made smartphones something that everyone and his brother has. (I'll probably get a bunch of WinMo and Blackberry fans shouting me down here.) Before the iPhone, only some rich people, politicians, and geeks had smartphones, and they were clunky, and didn't have much in the way of 3rd-party apps. After the iPhone, everything changed: now everyone has one.
The problem with Jobs was that he was greedy and hated open platforms and competition; he wanted to be the only serious smartphone supplier, and everything about his products screamed proprietary and our-way-or-the-highway.. The basic technology wasn't that hard, so they were quickly copied by Android. And now, Android dominates the market; Apple merely served to break it open.
Musk is different: he doesn't seem motivated by greed at all, unlike Jobs who was a complete control freak. Musk seems to just want to bring new technologies to fruition. Rockets and electric cars aren't really new inventions by any stretch, but space launches have been enormously expensive in the past and his private company is bringing those costs down in an era when NASA can't seem to do anything besides small unmanned missions, and electric cars (not counting golf carts) have only been experimented with but not in a serious way because entrenched players don't want them competing with their high-maintenance gasoline cars. Now with Tesla, you can have an electric car with excellent range and performance and luxury features; before this, you could have a GM EV1 which was seized from you and crushed after a short time, or you could have a Nissan Leaf which is an ugly econobox with crappy range and performance and you're not allowed to own, only lease. I think there was some other econobox EV too before Tesla, but I'm not sure about that.
So in the sense that they're both breaking open new markets, they are similar. Their methods are entirely different however. Tesla shares its tech with others and appears to be eager to be a battery provider to other EV makers. Apple OTOH refuses to play nice with anyone, and insists on dominating everything and shutting out all competition.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday October 15 2014, @01:16PM
That wasn't my experience at all. There was definitely a period in my highschool, somewhere between the RAZR and the iPhones, where everyone I knew wanted either a Blackberry or the T-Mobile Sidekick. Particularly the Sidekick, that thing was MASSIVELY popular. And yeah, the Sidekick wasn't a true smartphone -- but neither was the original iPhone. The Sidekick had more apps too. Of course, not too many kids actually owned either due to the price of the data plans. But definitely far more had one of those than the original iPhone -- the only person I know who owned the original iPhone ALSO had a Sidekick at the time.
I didn't see smartphones start to REALLY get popular until around the release of the iPhone 3G. I think Apple was more a case of being in the right place at the right time (which, yes, does require some skill) rather than creating the market. Cell phones had been evolving into smartphones for nearly a decade before the iPhone came around, the market definitely existed already. Even the 'whole device is a screen' form-factor predates the iPhone, though most phones were navigating them using trackpads and slide-out keyboards at the time, but the touch screen concept would have come around anyway if Apple hadn't done it. Maybe the only reason Apple got there first is because Apple was the only company that could get people to pay the prices such a device would cost.