It's important to note that 20 years ago the surprising thing would be the surprise that you express here: "The difference is mostly related to the number of p

It's important to note that 20 years ago the surprising thing would be the surprise that you express here: "The difference is mostly related to the number of parts being ordered. For a startup, ordering 100,000+ parts just to get pricing reasonable is a no-go unless you (or your backers) take a major risk. Makes you feel like getting off the ground is almost impossible, when you can't even get your wholesale cost below the retail cost of similar products." We just had 150 years where this was so normal that most people didn't think much of it, and very few people ever thought about starting their own business, exactly because it was understood that you could not compete with the economies of scale enjoyed by John Davison Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Andrew W. Mellon. What's interesting is that this attitude has recently been changing. The economist Larry Summers has made this point about WhatsApp, using WhatsApp as an example of the falling need for capital: http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-summers-on-whatsapp-2014-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-summers-on-whatsapp-201... "Ponder for example that the leading technological companies of this age, I think for example of Apple and Google, find themselves swimming in cash and facing the challenge of what to do with a very large cash hoard. Ponder the fact that WhatsApp has a greater market value than Sony with next to no capital investment required to achieve it. Ponder the fact that it used to require tens of millions of dollars to start a significant new venture. Significance new ventures today are seeded with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the information technology era. All of this means reduced demand for investment with consequences for the flow of - with consequences for equilibrium levels of interest rates." He suggests a negative consequence, that it is difficult to get real interest rates above 0% in a world where people can start a business with little capital, and he suggests that this might contribute to secular stagnation. Of course, things don't need to be as grim as he suggests. Ideally, the low costs would lead to a flood of research, but that hasn't happened so far, in part because VCs are scornful of what they refer to as "science projects" and the financial community continues to look for returns within 10 years, which is almost certainly the wrong timeframe for 0% interest rates (the low rate suggests a low discount rate which suggests that investors should think long term).