[jasonisalive]

I already did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8887167

What if Ensure had a cool name and didn't carry connotations of age and disease? What if it was sexily marketed? What if it was easy to flavour and make delicious? What if you signed up for a subscription and never thought about it again? What if you got it from vending machines that were everywhere you went and recognised you as you approached, having a glass perfectly formulated to your tastes and needs at that precise moment ready? What if it came out of a tap? What if your home 3D printer could form it into a multitude of shapes and textures (bar, cookie, cereal) and it would still be nutritionally balanced? What if it was surrounded by a devoted and inventive community of DIY hackers? What if the creator of Ensure was rapidly iterating it and discussing engineering microbes to produce pure versions of it?

Oh, or is it easier, instead of using your imagination and a bit of enthusiasm, to point to how it's similar to a crappy product that nobody bothered to market, and imply that it won't be sucessful - because we all know the success and impact of a product has nothing to do with the creativity, perserverance and vision of the creators, right?

[philwelch]

I can go to the drugstore and get a day's nutrition worth of Ensure right now. How long is the waiting list for Soylent? Because it turns out that actually having product available is like, step 0 of marketing.

Besides, I already conceded that Soylent is marketed to hipsters. If its creators had "creativity" or "vision", they wouldn't have reinvented Ensure. It's marketing over substance.

[0xDOOD]

>What if Ensure had a cool name and didn't carry connotations of age and disease?

"Soylent" carries connotations of being made of the ground up corpses of the poor, so...

> What if it was easy to flavour and make delicious?

Is it easier to do with Soylent than Ensure, or any other drink? You can put sugar into anything, and "delicious" is relative.

> What if you signed up for a subscription and never thought about it again?

Other services offer food delivery, and arguably, just going to the store is often more convenient and cost effective.

>What if you got it from vending machines that were everywhere you went and recognised you as you approached, having a glass perfectly formulated to your tastes and needs at that precise moment ready?

Soylent doesn't have vending machines networked to some sort of facial-recognition AI.

>What if it came out of a tap?

Soylent doesn't come out of a tap.

> What if your home 3D printer could form it into a multitude of shapes and textures (bar, cookie, cereal) and it would still be nutritionally balanced?

That's an argument for the transformational nature of 3d printing, not Soylent.

> or is it easier, instead of using your imagination and a bit of enthusiasm, to point to how it's similar to a crappy product that nobody bothered to market, and imply that it won't be sucessful - because we all know the success and impact of a product has nothing to do with the creativity, perserverance and vision of the creators, right?

It is similar. Everything you've mentioned about how revolutionary Soylent is, appears to be either marketing hype (Ensure doesn't iterate, it isn't hip, it's associated with old people, etc etc) or pie-in-the-sky stuff that doesn't even relate to Soylent as a product, and doesn't even exist. The argument that the Soylent which actually exists is basically Ensure for hipsters still seems valid.