A sad example of how technology gets misinterpreted. (Thread.) https://twitter.com/matthewputman/status/1280141864159645696

Far-UVC light kills germs.

If its wavelength is <230 nanometers, it doesn't damage human tissue, so you can keep the lights on when there are people around and sterilize the air.

COVID-19 is droplet-borne, so you need this more than you need surface sterilization.

But <230 nm UVC light is expensive to mass-produce. Fortunately, Matthew's company, Nanotronics, invented a way to make these safe germ-killing lights much more efficiently!

Surely this should be valuable in the fight against COVID-19!

The trouble is that US local & national governments seem not to have understood this nuance, and when they have funded the use of UVC light in e.g. the New York subway system, it's always been the longer-wavelength kind that isn't safe to use when humans are present.

This is a common pattern with technology.

1. we have a PROBLEM.

2. somebody invents a way to SOLVE that problem.

3. other people sell things that sound similar but DON'T SOLVE THE PROBLEM. These imitators get more traction than the real solution.

why do ineffective knock-offs sell well?

maybe the buyers don't understand the problem well enough; maybe they aren't incentivized to actually solve the problem.

Meanwhile, it puts the makers of real solutions in a weird position. In order to compete with the ineffective knockoffs, they have to explain that "unlike everyone else on the market, our thing WORKS."

this is awkward to say outright because you're insulting your entire industry and your customers' judgment...

but otherwise you just look like a less-well-funded, not-necessarily-superior version of the other guys!

Meanwhile, if customers are used to ineffective knockoffs, they will *not even consider the possibility* of something in the space that actually works!

They're not naive; they see that the problem isn't gone. They think that's because it's unsolved or unsolvable.

If you're considering purchasing something in a category that usually doesn't work, you're doing it for liability reasons or for good PR or on the off chance it'll help a little. Of COURSE all your vendors will claim it's a miracle cure; that's just marketing copy.

So, even if you have the best of intentions, you might not NOTICE when a technology comes along that 100% genuinely solves your entire problem. From your perspective, it'll look like just another inflated marketing claim!