> You're assigning far more importance to research group purchases than I think is warranted. They don't buy enough to create economies of scale. That's why res

> You're assigning far more importance to research group purchases than I think is warranted. They don't buy enough to create economies of scale. That's why researchers so frequently adopt consumer products already manufactured at scale, like the Novint Falcon, Microsoft Kinect, and gaming graphics cards. This is true, but in the consequences I have to disagree: Very often from this kind of "abusing" consumer products for research purposes there emerge quite interesting applications that do become quite popular and economically important. For example from such research there came the idea to use the Kinect as a 3D scanner - from this commercial applications emerged. Or from GPGPU (which at the beginning NVidia was quite the opposite of enthusiastic about) CUDA and later OpenCL emerged (which is much better to program for than abusing vertex and fragment shaders). That is why I considered it is quite important for the future of the Cell when researchers went from tinkered PS3 clusters to GPGPU and called this a "landslide event for the future of the Cell".