Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.
The feedback loop in Capitalism is to direct capital towards people who discover more efficient way to provide goods and services, or provide better goods and services, to help them scale up, or give people with a proven track record more resources to devote to new enterprises. This is exactly what we want.
There are three main issues with this picture.
The first is rent seeking behaviour, where simply having capital enables growing more capital without productive activity. This is what we need to tax punitively. Capital that is not being used productively is dead weight on the economy.
Secondly, monopolistic behaviour is closely related to rent seeking, it's using market power to extract rents or exert unfair influence.
Finally inheritance is a problem because it's un-earned wealth. There's no reason to expect that those inheriting wealth are likely to manage it effectively. Inheritance taxes should be high, without being overly punitive after all one of the main incentives to work hard and accumulate wealth is to provide for the next generation. You want to allow successful business owners and investors to benefit their families without facilitating excess waste of resources.
When Salesforce goes out and gets a patent that says you can't have any client resembling Slack without paying them royalties , then you can consider that a monopoly.
And for fringe companies like BD, its honestly better that they get acquired by someone that can dump IRAD money into it cause the research that comes out of these is arguably more valuable than the products they produce.
> United States v. Grinnell Corp., 384 U.S. 563 (1966) Grinnell made plumbing supplies and fire sprinklers, and with affiliates had 87% of the central station protective service market. From this predominant share there was no doubt of monopoly power.
Semi-facetious summary: there’s not a lot of demand for local, organic, artisan all-terrain robot packhorses.
Just a speculation (and not very related to BD in particular but to a situation where internet got overtaken by corporations instead of becoming that decentralized paradise we once hoped for).
It seems Boston Dyanmics is a solution looking for a problem. It can be a great company but it's going to take a long investment by Hyundai. It's been in the hands of some huge companies and none of them have been able to squeeze a profit out of it.
I don't see how one could argue there is no natural tendency towards monopoly capital given these key facts.
We had this in post-War America. What broke it up? Activist investors. Corporate raiders. The stereotypical bad guys of 1990s media. (Also, antitrust action. The situation is a product of public and private sector failures combined.)
Ghost Robotics...DARPA funded.. are actually a tad cheaper but will likely only for govt and military contracts first.
Lenin analysed it more than a century ago https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/
Even if either has a path to profitability.
Robots are very hard, and Boston Dynamics has been around for almost 40 years and still isn't anywhere close to making a lot of money.
Apps have added a lot more value to my life than BD ever has.
Fwiw I interviewed with BD a few years ago, and am focusing on robotics, so I'd like the opposite to be true
This thinking will never take humans on Mars! Someone must work on hard, expensive problems.
Human race does won't move forward with a chat but with the hard work of scientist, engineers etc ...
I mean, we're talking about the value of a business. Boston Dynamics is more of a research lab. They don't really have much in the way of revenue streams, customers, products, etc.
Some of the scientist and engineers working there might invent/discover what could be the most significant thing in human history for the next hundred years. Leading to a fabulous amount of wealth creation. But there's no guarantee the company financing all of this will be able to capitalize on that invention.
That's a lot of ifs. If people there invent something important; if the company sees the true value of the invention; if it is marketed in a way that makes money; if etc...
b) Is there a specific app with just a few thousand users that sold for more than $1B?
If BD lives up to its perennial hype/technical-success and is not encumbered with significant liabilities, Hyundai may have gotten quite a deal.
It doesn't matter if you are doing consulting with the most specialized meditation app UI researchers or the most specialized cyber-biology engineers with experience in exobiology and colonizing other celestial bodies. It's still consulting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Dynamics#Company_histor...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-17/boston-dy...
Hyundai Robotics is a much bigger chance for this, particularly considering they've rather concrete plans for it already trough their HGZN partnership [0].
Makes much more sense than with Tesla, all Tesla can offer on that front is battery tech, which is kinda useless for autonomous manufacturing as everything there can be easily powered trough a line.
[0] https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2020/04/21/hgzn-and-hy...
All jokes aside, Hyundai can probably do much more with Boston Dynamics than Tesla. Tesla has already failed to automate, using the exact same method as Ford in the 80s. Doubt that throwing more advanced tech at it solves a fundamental logistics problem.
If you eliminate one kind of job, then another, then another, and then implement general purpose job elimination, where does it end?
Is it not an axiom of the world that there simply isn’t enough knowledge work to go around all seven billion of us?
By taking away jobs what do those of us who aren’t programmers, architects, novelists or day spa wait staff have left to do?
(Thank you for your comment, it really made me think.)
Normally we dread this coming from the supply side, “will we end all possible work through automation?”
But if you think it from the demand side, people will always need something like “work”: structured schedule, socialization, ways to differentiate yourself from others through “achievements” that not everyone can do, etc.
Even in an utopian society where all material needs are covered and wealth redistributed, people would create and consume art, “fight” for relevance, create petty politics... and gladly “pay” for part of that. So we will end up inventing new jobs in any case, so we can keep on using the same old concepts and social structure, just not for food acquisition.
If you think about it, this sophistication has been happening for some centuries already.
I could talk about this for days, but: the more we automate below us on Maslow’s pyramid, the higher we raise our baseline.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've already been breaking the site guidelines quite a bit with this account. Can you please not? Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25333233 are particularly not ok here.
Anything disruptive attracts this kind of attention and even if you don't think they will succeed it's hard to argue they are not disruptive.
In addition to building cars and trucks, Hyundai does the following:
* building construction (everything from homes to office and factories)
* civil engineering (bridges, dams, shipyards, etc.)
* trains of various kinds
* military vehicles, including tanks
* construction equipment (cranes, etc.)
* manufacturing equipment (furnaces, presses, etc)
* shipbuilding (both civilian and military)
* shipping
* offshore oil rigs
* powerplants and electrical grid equipment
* has a large retail department store chain
* insurance
* chemicals and plastics
* lighting
and, of course...
robots (currently just industrial and medical)
Steel making and mining, talk about vertical integration!
Much more. "It is the second largest South Korean chaebol or conglomerate, after Samsung Group, related to other Hyundai-name industries following a specialized development split and restructuring which resulted in Hyundai Motor group, Hyundai Heavy Industries Group, Hyundai Development Company Group, Hyundai Department Store Group, and Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance."[0]
They even build ships and oil rigs.
Robots are used to make cars. Robots and cars both require precision engineering at a macro scale. Both have lots of electronics and control systems, even leaving out self-driving or autonomous capabilities.
For 5% of Hyundai's market cap, I think you can make a case for BD being valuable to Hyundai just as a car manufacturer, or having synergies with its core business.
Edit: they make them - https://www.hyundai-robotics.com/
South Korea is a treaty ally with the US. The US has thousands of soldiers at bases in S. Korea. S. Korea is not a country the US has to worry about afaik.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Defense_Treaty_(United_...
Wonder if China's gonna require any IP transfer?
[0] https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2020/04/21/hgzn-and-hy...
The robots are practically weapons. Imagine the 4-legged one chasing you down like a large cat could, then pouncing on you. Imagine the 2-legged one with armor, relentlessly stalking you like Terminator.
https://www.ft.com/content/30408b0e-50e2-11e9-b401-8d9ef1626...
edit: not the FTC, it was Cfius
Good for him, I think.
And generally, it got passed around because there is valuable research IP that belongs to the company, which given the right market can be valuable, so in the spirit of capitalizing on it if that market realizes, companies either jump on it, or preemptively buy it for a later sale (which is no doubt what Softbank did)
Their new pivot towards wheeled logistic robots is acknowledgement of this fact. They still try to push probably unnecessary "legs with wheels" with Handle.
What robot revolution needs is nimble hands.
My guess would be that Hyundai's product development organizations, in theory, can take Boston Dynamic's technology and integrate it into products that can be sold commercially. As an automobile and robotics[0] manufacturer, Hyundai actually has a better chance than Google or SoftBank since they know a fair amount about manufacturing machines.
I understand that the valuation of a company is also determined by its earning potential but did Boston Dynamics have that so much that it justified this crazy valuation.
From what I know it barely made any revenue while being in business for more than 25 years. It couldn't find a customer to produce any of its hyped robots at scale. It was clearly a loss-magnet entity for Softbank which is in a selling mode in the wake of Uber/Wework disaster.
In any other country valuation like this would have become the subject of enormous assessment because outside the US, $1 bn still means a lot of money. But I think USA is beyond but I really do not understand the system which facilitates such transaction without the corresponding exchange in value. How is the money being made?
In my home country (India) it’d be impossible for a company to reach such valuations based only on research and prototypes, which in turn leads to low salaries for STEM people, culminating in brain drain.
On the same context,
Imagine if Boston Dynamics was only involved with drones, it would have never changed hands.
When absurd deals are happening it could mean the bubble is about to burst though.
> In early November, Bloomberg first reported that Hyundai was in talks to acquire Boston Dynamics from Tokyo-based SoftBank Group. The Japanese conglomerate is selling off non-core business assets after it was hit hard by a series of soured bets, including WeWork and Uber. In September 2020, Softbank sold Arm to NVIDIA for $40 billion.
This does sound like shedding off bets that didn't quite live up to the expectation, and making a small[0] profit off of it.
[0] Small in the eye of Softbank. If you have a $100B fund and got 0.7B profit, those 0.7% are going to move your needle very much.
Also..historically robotics companies get acquired by Asian companies because that’s where manufacture and production is happening. Also..in America, we are not as tech forward and don’t embrace robots on our intersections like they’d do in Asia..China, Singapore, Japan, Korea etc.
Can you imagine if SPOT mini went around asking people to mask up in American public parks? But Singapore deployed SPOT minis during covid and no one batted an eyelid.
When I approached my city’s PD and FD to acquire a couple of SPOT minis, I got a response that I wish I can share here..but sadly I can’t.. suffice to say that it was jaw dropping. With calls for defunding police departments, they are already on financial survival mode.. high tech will never reach American cities never mind be well adopted as in Asian cities.
KUKA for example became a Chinese company and was bought out for a pittance. At least Boston Dynamics had a good valuation. I guess SoftBank in America are better deal makers than German KUKA.
I have consistently been amazed by the demise and/or sell off of robotics companies for cheap. If the $1 billion number is true, I think that would be the highest number for an acquisition for a robotics company.
If you have a solid software platform you can scale it up to millions of users at very little operation cost per user.
But a robot? You have a very significant cost per unit. Not to mention lots of risk if you have any warranties and for your brand.
Like if you ship 100k units and they have a critical component that gives out after 2 months due to a bad manufacturing run that's a huge cost.
You don't have that type of risk with software. Software is just way less risky and way more profitable.
... that hasn't found a scalable business model in 28 years of operation. Hence the low valuation despite great tech.
I seriously admire their work and it's great that they've been able to fund it in various ways when almost all the robot businesses come and go quickly. They've been able to grind away at very hard problems. But so far no scalable product.
I hope they (and the mobile robot business in general) finds some more killer apps after weapons, vacuums, warehousing and (almost) cars. They seem to come along pretty slowly.
Seriously, I can't understand why a company developing advanced products that will have civil and military uses was valued so low. Is it struggling with money? Did their progress stall?
> It is not yet clear how Boston Dynamics will fit into Hyundai, which becomes the third owner of Boston Dynamics in seven years. It was acquired by Google in 2013 and sold to Softbank Group in 2017
It’s an old but consistent story.
I'm not disagreeing, but BD doesn't really have a business. There isn't even really an industry/market for these kind of robots.
How do you value an R&D lab? A billion dollars is still a lot of money.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21362322/hyundai-aptiv-mo...
My guess is they got acquired for some research they have done in dynamic trajectory planning, which can be useful in self driving cars.
Interesting, I thought Spot was the first commercial product BD sold. But the Pick System seems like it would be much more viable for commercial application and adaption.
Particularly when combined with Hyundai's experience and presence in manufacturing, construction, healthcare [0] and even logistics [1] automation.
[0] https://control.com/news/a-look-into-hyundai-robotics-latest...
[1] https://www.supplychaindigital.com/technology/hyundai-improv...
Hyundai builds real things in quantity. This could work out.
Or even a lawnmower.
This can become their cash cow, that they use to fund the R&D into their serious industrial robots.
Slightly racist but lighten up its funny
