This seems to be the most plausible explanation. I can remember Steve Ballmer, an undeniably intelligent and capable professional, laughing away the idea of the iPhone doing even single digit percentage market share.

I don’t think it was just competitive posturing. He genuinely was down talking what is arguably the most successful consumer product of the last 50 years.

Steve Ballmer was making sales projection claims. His biggest objection was cost of the phone, and apple overcame that with carrier financing. He never claimed that was Apple was trying was not physically possible according to our understanding of technology, just that it was too expensive and too different to be popular.

Professionals panning Theranos were not doing so because they thought it could not sell, or the cost, or other market-based concerns. They had "what you're saying is not possible based on my understanding of the physical world" concerns, and those questions were never answered at any point because it was a fraud and there was no answer.

The difference seems to be that Ballmer definitely was an expert for all things commercial/enterprisey (he made MS quite a bit of money during his reign), but not an expert for consumer products.

> The difference seems to be that Ballmer definitely was an expert for all things commercial...

That's exactly what Ballmer was commenting on - the iPhone's $500 price (IIRC) was going to cause sticker shock, had it not been spread over a 24-month contract period. When Job's announced the price, he didn't mention carrier financing.

I dunno, the PC itself has probably had more overall impact, but on a consumer level, smartphones are probably bigger I guess.

Smartphones have more impact. Smartphones are shipped in the billions each year and for most people on the planet it's their first and primary computer. PCs only ship in the 150 million per year range.

Again, agreed on consumer. On society, definitely the PC as they've transformed pretty much every business and almost every home in the world. Like PC's have been shipping my entire life (approx 40 years), while smartphones (touch screen iPhone like etc) have only been around for the last 14.

And how are all smartphone apps developed?

I agree to an extent. The criticism was more like, "that seems physically impossible," like many of us might react if a story claiming someone had invented warp drive got to the top of HN.

However, most of the knowledge about such things is "siloed" inside the lab science community itself, without much awareness from the outside.

That being said, I think so few Valley VCs got duped because they actually did the due diligence and determined this was in the "not physically possible" realm.

Scientists have exactly the same behavior, bias against the paradigm breaking new. Of course this does a good job most of the time filtering out crap, but any big changes that are legitimate are going to have a whole lot of pushback.

“a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

listen to reason, not authority

I think it’s important to understand the difference between product/engineering skepticism (eg, it will be hard for a new entrant to build a great smartphone; it will be hard to break into the taxi industry with an app) and fundamental scientific skepticism based on a claim of some major scientific breakthrough. These are vastly different things, and (in my understanding) experts correctly realized that Theranos would have needed the latter for their product claims to be true. This is what the investors failed to internalize.

I know it’s popular (and sometimes true) to blame scientists for failing to adopt new ideas, but I don’t think you get to play that card in a situation where the alleged ideas are being kept secret. And yet many do play that card. As a scientist if someone arrives with a product that implies a massive (but unpublished) scientific breakthrough, then I’m going to express polite skepticism until they publish their results. If for whatever business reason, the startup wants to keep their breakthrough secret (rather than publishing and patenting it), well that rings alarm bells — but even then surely the investors can hire outside experts to review the science under NDA. If the startup refuses even that, then I think you need to accept that the most likely possibility is fraud rather than someone figuring out how to bypass the laws of thermodynamics or whatever.

Are you suggesting the scientists in this case didn't give good reasons?