X-Message-Number: 18443 Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 10:52:21 -0500 (EST) From: Charles Platt <> Subject: future businesses According to Ron Havelock: "none of the inventors or early developers of any of these technologies ended up being either a big winner economically or a major player after diffusion reached critical mass." Not always so. Alexander Graham Bell did pretty well, though he had to fight viciously for what he got. Tesla benefited for a while. I seem to remember that some of the early semiconductor guys managed to collect a tidy sum. Ah, but these were INVENTORS with PATENTS! I agree with Ron that the current cryonics businesses should not expect to be dominant 30 or 50 years from now, because they don't have any patents, or much capital, or a significant share of the future market. Suppose cryonics is marketed much as MRIs were marketed initially, as an ancillary hospital service. A few MDs get together, pool their cash, borrow more, and set up a lab for a few million. This instantly puts them on an equal basis with any current organization, plus they have hospital affiliations in place (for referrals, the heart of medical practices). This is the most favorable model I can imagine, to allow current organizations to survive. A much worse model would be Kaiser Permanente deciding to add cryonics to its list of services; or some other equally large business with a nationwide coverage. At that point, Alcor or CI will be like the very early auto manufacturers, confronted with Henry Ford. A back-room handcrafting businesses cannot compete with an assembly line. This of course doesn't worry me at all so long as the existing organizations run themselves reasonably well from a financial point of view, so that they can be taken over by larger organizations with minimal trouble. One assumes that the patients will be inherited, too. As for an existing organization TURNING ITSELF INTO a nationwide service with many branches and much capital, as Ron says, this contradicts our experience of other businesses and the usual pattern of tech development. One caveat: We are assuming (probably wrongly) that future cryonics work will be done by full-service rather than unbundled organizations. I would be very surprised if cryonics storage is not split away from cryonics emergency services, just as mortuaries are a very different business from medical care. Timeship has been planned on a large scale. It is conceivable that it could be built to serve future cryonics businesses that process large number of patients and then transfer them to Timeship for preservation. --CP Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=18443