“There is no ‘minimum viable product’ in hardware,” he says, referencing the trendy notion in software that you should launch the first “good-enough” version of

“There is no ‘minimum viable product’ in hardware,” he says, referencing the trendy notion in software that you should launch the first “good-enough” version of your idea. “One screw can put you out of business.” Indeed; scary stuff I learned while working for Lisp Machines Inc. I heard one believable legend at the time of a company with one or more boards that used a particularly pretty blue type of bypass capacitor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_capacitor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_capacitor). I think the original Multiwire Lisp Machine memory boards also used them, they were quite sharp looking, evidently a naturally popular choice. Anyway, the guy in charge in procuring parts suddenly found them unavailable, or with too long a lead time, and was tearing his hair out before he asked the engineers what could be done. After noting it was chosen for esthetics and there were many less pretty ones that would work just as well, the problem was solved. But if you've got something more complicated than ubiquitous capacitors and the like, not having it available at all halts you in your tracks, and that's true for every one of the zillions of parts in your products. There has been a lot of what appear to be subpar hardware designs (e.g. the DEC RK-07 disk system) that were made because of parts availability, which gets more acute the bigger the scale of your production.