2 ms·
Is the moat that good for HW? The more commodified your product is, the more you risk losing to undifferentiated foreign competitors who have lower input costs.
by nateglims 2y ago
Is the moat that good for HW? The more commodified your product is, the more you risk losing to undifferentiated foreign competitors who have lower input costs.
- bigiain 2y agoAnd hardware marches on while you are trying to get your widget manufactured and shipped. I was at a hardware startup in 2013/14. We had our own board design that was very similar to the RaspberryPi + Arduino that we'd prototyped with (we ended up using a iMX233 and an AT Mega 328). While we were debugging a manufacturing fault (out of spec led controllers), Expressif released the SDK for their at the time practically unknown ESP8862 - which meant 90% of our functionality could now be done with a BOM of around $15 instead of the $90 or so ours was costing us. Our "moat" had been concreted over while we were pulling our hair out trying to ship in time for xmas. (And the business died in arguments, recriminations, fingerpointing, and a lack of ability to find investment to pay for a 2nd production run. And I needed up with another piece of paper saying I had a percentage or two of ownership in something now worth zero dollars...)
- nateglims 2y agoI was doing firmware in IoT/M2M for an engineering services company back then and it was the tail end of "slap a radio on [common product]" projects for that company. I saw a few projects end with the arguments and fingerpointing with inevitable laser focus on what the SOW actually said and it always sucked to end that way.