I think that's a reasonable assumption. Economies of scale apply to all hardware, and there are many roles that a given robot design could fulfill, given the ri

I think that's a reasonable assumption. Economies of scale apply to all hardware, and there are many roles that a given robot design could fulfill, given the right software. The mainframe market might be a reasonable predictive model to look at (where there were a handful of dominant players, a few software companies around them, and hordes of service contractors who maintained them and helped companies accomplish their goals with the hardware available), at least until general purpose robots get cheap enough to look more like PCs. They're getting pretty close to that already, though, so maybe we'll skip right over the mainframe stage and right into personal robotics. I dunno. Depends how fast prices come down...I don't think the pricing works the same as PCs, as there is no "Moore's law" equivalent for robotics components. The price trends downward, and performance trends upward, but not at a multiplicative rate. As it stands for now, though, robots doing complicated things are generally working as a team with computation in the cloud, so the PC "buy it and own it" model can't work. Robots, at least the kind that are doing real work, are purchased or leased as a hardware-plus-service bundle (again, kinda like mainframes).