Well written and mostly agreeable but I've got a lowbrow dismissal incoming: I disagree that Cruise could be considered hard tech. The hard tech in that space was done by universities competing for DARPA awards, and Google after that. Cruise took inaccessible hard tech and made it more accessible.
And that isn't an insult to Cruise. The problem space is still difficult, and they created more value tackling that than the vast majority of startups do on much easier problems. I happen to think that the opportunities for making the cutting edge more accessible vastly outweigh the opportunities for cutting new edges, and nobody should be discouraged from doing it because it isn't as glamorous as the research on the ground floor.
"Cruise took inaccessible hard tech and made it more accessible."
This seems to be a standard path for businesses in the tech space. The value many of these companies bring is not the tech itself but the ability to get that tech to the masses (which is no small feat).
It's why the classic techie response to a tech product is "who cares I can already do that with {insert X inaccessible technologies glued together with shell scripts}." The original dropbox thread on HN is a great example of this.
I'm wondering how much of that is due to how "hard" the tech is (the research had been done by Sebastian Thrun/Carnegie Mellon in the 90s) vs. the maker renaissance spurred by the drastically falling cost of hardware?
Though I suppose "true" fully autonomous self-driving cars that can handle things like rain, human driver non-verbal communication (like eye contact and the finger), and left turns onto oncoming traffic are still at least a decade away, at least according to MIT's John Leonard, the Cruise founder's likely protégé. [1]
It goes without saying that California with its perfect weather and perfect highways is a rather unfair testing ground for autonomous vehicles, as unfortunate as it is the hotspot for a lot of the autonomous driving research. (Maybe that's why the researchers more grounded in reality are the ones in Pittsburgh and MIT/Boston?)
I remember when a LIDAR unit was a $30,000 SICK laser unit, but now you have the same kind of sensor in your $100 Kinect.
Also here's the original Cruise HN thread where some skepticism was also expressed. Interestingly the criticisms were more that it was too hard and a $10k bolt on box wouldn't drive safely enough https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7933045
Interestingly, Kyle (founder of Cruise) was intimately involved with the DARPA Grand Challenge at MIT when the goal was to engineer a self-driving car.
In his book Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard makes a distinction between invention and innovation. Innovation is the application of an invention to solve a problem and create a marketable product.
Chouinard is one of the most innovative folks in the history of the climbing industry, having introduced a lot of now-standard technologies like curved ice axe picks, polyester long underwear, and polyester fleece for warmth. I highly recommend the book.
I don't think you're being dismissive at all - if anything I think you've added some much relevant context to the discussion. I appreciate you mentioning this relationship between development and monetization.
And that isn't an insult to Cruise. The problem space is still difficult, and they created more value tackling that than the vast majority of startups do on much easier problems. I happen to think that the opportunities for making the cutting edge more accessible vastly outweigh the opportunities for cutting new edges, and nobody should be discouraged from doing it because it isn't as glamorous as the research on the ground floor.