That may be true in a literal sense but misses the far more important corollary: low hanging fruit in consumer technology often drives progress in harder domains. Military and academic investment in telecommunications and transistors may have given birth to Silicon Valley and IT as we know it today, but it was massive investment to feed consumer demand that really made harder scientific and engineering problems tractable.

The drive for better graphics in gaming fundamentally changed the face of bioinformatics and genetics, finite element analysis and by extension, almost every subfield of mechanical and civil engineering, and many others. The logistics and transportation industries have gone through a quiet technological revolution every decade as economies of scale drove the cost of computers, GPS, and other embedded electronics to the floor. The demand for laptops, mobile phones, and tablets with ever more complex apps and games is responsible for at least a 5-10x change in productivity for my EE and firmware work over the last decade as the sheer scale of work on consumer electronics around the globe drives down the cost of parts and services right as the hardware world is beginning to learn about the benefits of open source.

> Theranos' was not about making something previously impossible, possible.

Yes, it was. They were trying to do more tests with less blood. That's like, you know, new advances in biomedical science.

> Theranos doesn't have anything to do with biomedical science,

They claimed to create a new method for blood testing that required a fraction of the sample size previously required. That is, by definition, biomedical science.

> they were supposed to improve the experience of blood testing both for the patient and for the medical professionals.

Yes, but that pesky biomedical science got in the way.

> Their problem was that they choose to try to do it by a method that was not technically possible at this time.

The limits of biomedical science can be a real buzzkill. But hey, the UX was great!

> Another company might try to improve the experience by improving the needles and redesign the machine to look like less offensive and scary and they might succeed in it.

It failed because it didn't work. Because biomedical science.

> It's exactly like the difference between SodaStream's success and chatbots failure, that is, betting on UX improvement using a tech that's not there.

We should all tell Merck and Pfizer to be more like SodaStream. Cancer would be a thing of a past. It's merely a UX problem.

> Chatbots, SodaStream. Theranos - they don't do anything new that wasn't done before. Chatting with customer support was around since a while, Carbonating water to make soda was around since probably the industrial revolution and testing blood samples were around since modern medicine.

I went into the forest once for a hike, it was very nice. I liked the trees. Do you like to hike? It's good for you. Modern medicine.

> All these companies tried to improve the experience and reduce costs, regardless of the nature of the business being internet or manufacturing based. It's not about the domain.

What you're trying to do never matters! Cancer can be cured. We just need to improve the experience and reduce costs!

> All these companies tried to improve the experience and reduce costs, regardless of the nature of the business being internet or manufacturing based.

No, Theranos did not do that. They claimed that's what they were trying to do, but they were, in reality, marketing a fraudulent product that did not work.

This is very simple. It is also a very important distinction, and it's worrying that many people here seem not to get it. This is not a "they tried and failed with the best of intentions" situation. This is not a typical failed-startup situation. This is not a product-market-fit issue.

This is a company that claimed to be improving the state of the art but was actually engaging in a deliberate deception.

You don't have to know the "motive of the people involved" to understand that Theranos' situation is fundamentally ethically different from that of a well-intentioned company that was unable to deliver on its promises. This isn't a difference in degree (of money involved or people defrauded or whatever), it is a qualitative difference. It's deeply disturbing to me that yourself and many others seem unable to see that.

I don't know about the details of the case so I'm trying not to claim that somebody did something in bad faith. I find internet lynches distasteful.

Did an actual investigation found out that these people scammed the investors?

What was their end game? Live a life of fame for a few years until people start asking questions and end up broke and labelled as frauds for the rest of their lives?

> Theranos doesn't have anything to do with biomedical science

Doesn't it? Wasn't that the main claim of the company? To have the technology that allows to do a lot of tests with very small amounts of blood? In your description it sounds like "Theranos had a great idea, unfortunately the technology was not read", like some kind of mild inconvenience that stopped something brilliant. Like "My company wants to build flying cars based on anti-matter reactors. The technology doesn't exist but, apart from that, isn't my idea brilliant?"

I think their main claim was to improve the experience and reduce the costs for the users and the medical professionals.

The rest of your comment is a straw-man argument as it misrepresents my words as I never even implied that they had a great idea or tech or anything like that. Sorry I cannot defend words that are not my own.

That's like saying that a scam company that claims to sell a widget that makes your car go at 500 mph, with a mileage of 1000 mpg is not 'claiming something previously thought impossible to be possible.'

Cars exist, and fast cars exist, and people mod cars, so obviously, it should be possible to soup up my Honda Civic with their amazing invention.

Theranos claimed that they had technology that could perform accurate blood tests on tiny samples of blood, drawn from a finger. For many tests, this is currently believed to be impossible (with sufficient accuracy.)