Quote:
Originally Posted by blankall
You've got this backwards. We aren't seeming more battery progress because there is more demand. There's more demand because there is more progress.
Once again, the lithium ion battery has been in the works since the 1970s, with virtually all of the big electronics, consumer products, and automobile companies in on the action. Do you really think that having members of the public telling them to work faster would have sped things up? Once again if a company like Sony had developed and patented a modern cell phone battery in 1985, they should have cornered the entire electronics market. That's not enough incentive? Instead having Joe Public say make it faster is what was missing?
|
I don't follow at all. Why did Sony dump money into battery research at the time? Because they saw market opportunity.
You weigh your odds of success against potential market opportunity, and see if you have fit within your current strategy, then allocate R&D investment as such.
This isn't the "public telling them to work faster". This is the potential market opportunity exploding, and as such, so did R&D efforts.
If just the original Sony team continued to work on LiOn batteries from 1970 until now, there is no question we'd be much further behind.
To Fuzz's point, the necessary material science advances this is dependent on are also seeing way more R&D because the market opportunity is massive.
The cancer argument is a poor one as well. That is a huge opportunity that has gotten a lot of money/time thrown at it:
