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posted by LaminatorX on Monday October 13 2014, @10:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the Eloi-Elan dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday October 15 2014, @01:16PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday October 15 2014, @01:16PM (#106230) Journal

    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.

    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.

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