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...
But it doesn't matter. A car costs a lot, yes, but the margin is not that big. You can't build a car and send the same unit to every buyer. While I can code once and sell the software to a million clients.
Tesla is the most valuable car company in the world and I think it has a lot to do with the software, not only the hardware.
Boston Dynamics makes utility robots that are cool from an engineering standpoint but not super useful (or even welcome) in someone's home. Hyundai makes a lot of sense, since these expensive-but-handy robots will fit in well with their other industrial robots and military equipment.
Renting a service + car together via rideshare does have some fundamental economic efficiencies (depending on where you live, and other aspects the situation)
Probably less than Toyota has extracted from me in my lifetime already.
Cars are lower margin, but they are expensive in absolute dollars, and their purchase almost always involves leverage. A $35,000 car will typically earn the manufacture $3-7k in direct profits, the financing arm gets ~$1800, the dealership gets ~$600 (plus profits from extended warranties, service, etc). There's still a ton of money to be made in automobile manufacturing.
And that's for an average car (actually, below average, the median new car price is nearly $40k). Vehicles like Porsches or an F-150s have insanely high margins. Porsche has the highest margins in the industry (50% for the 911) by a comfortable amount and Ford reports the percentage of F-150s sold for over $50k in their annual reports, and have for years, because it's the most critical aspect of their bottom line.
Tech companies benefit from having really dispersed revenue streams: they make a few dollars off of billions of people while car companies make thousands of dollars off of a few million people.
Software, like Microsoft Office, is also consumable, in the sense that your computer burns out, or Microsoft makes its operating system end-of-life after 5 years. This forces you to buy a new license.
So if Toyota makes $3,000 in profit per car. And you replace your car in 10 years, then this is $300/year. Or about $25/month in profits to Toyota.
If it’s $7,000, then the monthly profits goes up to $58/month for Toyota.
So it’s the equivalent to a Netflix or Cable TV subscription for Toyota. But with the entrenched benefit that being a car manufacturer is big business, and there aren’t that many players in it.
What Toyota did was to make perfect, their vehicles, that they have such a loyal following. That their customers go back to them for every new car, decade after decade.
And plus, they make more money from their luxury brand, Lexus, and from their trucks.
The first company to do this will own the market.
I think Tesla was trying to achieve this.
I’m describing more of a robotic Uber/Lyft, with Level 5 autonomous driving.
But not Uber, the company itself. Since we know they’re retarded, and wrote autonomous driving software that ran over a human. So we can’t trust them.
Even if either has a path to profitability.