Pivot

What do you do when your blood testing product has been shown not to work, you have been barred from running a laboratory and you are presenting before an audience of peers?  Why, you pivot and present yourself as a manufacturer of lab testing machines.  This is the highly unlikely scenario that blood testing company, Theranos, just did.  CEO Elizabeth Holmes took the stage and without so much as a mention or a mea culpa for the failure of her micro blood testing devices, she presented a new line of testing units, the size of a shoebox, intended for doctors’ offices.  The audience at the annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Chemistry was skeptical, and well they should be.  The come-down for Theranos has been sudden and sharp.  It is a zombie company  — a walking-dead organization.  Holmes’ efforts to publicize her new machines probably went for naught.  Who would buy equipment from a company shown to be a fraud?  One must give her credit for the attempt, but she was the source of the failure in the first place.  Maybe this was her way of saying, “I’m sorry.”  If so, it was strange.