I agree with you ('consumer' being the keyword if it's meant to mean 'high volume') but I wonder how a company digs it's way out of the situation defined in the

I agree with you ('consumer' being the keyword if it's meant to mean 'high volume') but I wonder how a company digs it's way out of the situation defined in the thread's article. Is a company intended to become better at toaster components? push the component complexity down to a more basic level and then have more bespoke manufacturing done? or to become a manufacturer/final assembler and all that that really implies? The real answer I guess is to command that your outsourced engineers design in some IoT toaster sorcery that allows you to sell toaster information to third parties.