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There's a somewhat famous example of creating a whole product line out of one design here: http://steveblank.com/2009/04/... SuperMac once offered 9 different Mac graphics boards priced from $700 to $4,000. The only difference between them was hardware wait states added to slow down the cheaper models. It's a very entertaining read, from my old friend Steve Blank.

Most device manufacturers do not have a lot of budget on their firmware development, so, what they do is to have a generic-enough firmware developed, then they add and/or delete a couple of options, depending on the price point of their device model, package it as the firmware for that particular model

Back in the olden days when we were using USRobotic dial up modems we used to buy 2400 baud modem and then re-flash them to run at 4800 or even 9600 baud

Dating back to at least 1990: http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-building-the-whole-product/

Steve Blank posted about this a couple of years ago:

The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free

> I had lived through this same conversation four times in my career, and each time it ended as an example of unintended consequences. No one on the board or the executive staff was trying to be stupid. But to save $10,000 or so, they unintentionally launched an exodus of their best engineers.

Read about Customer Development at Steve Blank blog.

An Angel investor can also help you with business connections and hiring the right person to do it.

With every new innovation... the private sector decreased cost of production...by introducing better design ideas

Says someone typing on a computer based on semiconductor integrated circuits which were invented by university academics using government funding and sold by the private sector to the military using more government funding.

The "private sector" is not the source of all innovation. It's not even a particularly meaningful term when it comes to electronics, Silicon Valley and the Internet. It's all a big ball of fundy-wundy defensey-wensey stuff. Aad a lot of the money has come from American taxpayers, and the long-term strategic investment direction has come from men in grey suits in the Pentagon who draw a government paycheck. And then there's the defense contractors who are only nominally "private". Somewhere floating on top of the big American tech melting pot is a thin layer of flashy public venture capitalism- the Googles and Facebooks. But they're not the ones who did the original hard work of science and invention that makes the fire underneath go.

I meant to link that. The Secret History of Silicon Valley

* ridiculously large & light zero-g free-floating solar arrays with uninterrupted sunlight

Which use that power to do what?

* space habitats & manufacturing plants

Which manufacture what, and send it where?

* spaceships

Which go where?

The big problem I see with space construction and habitation is bootstrapping: space construction makes sense once you have a big population in space, and space habitation makes sense once you have a lot of space construction to get done, but there's no fundamental point to all of it in the first place. It's like how the Space Shuttle was designed to get modules and people to the Space Station, which was designed to be serviced by the Space Shuttle, but the two of them together didn't actually have a reason to exist.

In the commercial world, this level of investment without ultimate return doesn't really happen. The big driver of space tech in the last 50 years has been military needs: the requirement to set cities we don't like on fire within 20 minutes, and then to take spy pictures of the other side's city-setting-on-fire facilities... and even going to the moon was a small clip-on hanging off the side of that whole military infrastructure. And yes, even Silicon Valley and the Internet were tiny byproducts of that huge flow of military money.

But it seems to have turned out that even having a manned base on the moon isn't even really that useful militarily, let alone paying its way commercially. It might yet happen, like Scott Base at Antarctica; but there aren't even penguins at Tranquility Base, so how many dead rocks are underfunded scientists and bored tourists going to pay to catalogue?

Teleoperated moon rovers I could see happening; they're relatively cheap and safe to launch. Fully manned presence? Hmm. Let me figure the health and class-action lawsuit insurance bills for that. Not seeing the upside yet.

It tickles me how Microsoft turned into a "me too" company.

There is some "conventional business wisdom" out there that says first mover advantage is a myth whereas "Fast Follower" is a really good place to be.

http://steveblank.com/2010/10/04/why-pioneers-are-the-ones-with-the-arrows-in-their-backs/

Goes into detail but the short version is, find something successful and copy it, means you don't have to spend a bundle on market research to find out what doesn't work. (Or something like that)

It's the "second mouse gets the cheese" principle.

It tickles me how Microsoft turned into a "me too" company.

There is some "conventional business wisdom" out there that says first mover advantage is a myth whereas "Fast Follower" is a really good place to be.

http://steveblank.com/2010/10/04/why-pioneers-are-the-ones-with-the-arrows-in-their-backs/

Goes into detail but the short version is, find something successful and copy it, means you don't have to spend a bundle on market research to find out what doesn't work. (Or something like that)

That's actually a known fact. The UFO talk was mainly a cover for a period when the US was sending balloons over the Soviet Union to photograph. UFOs were just a convenient way of diverting attention from that real activity to something that couldn't have anything to do with us.

http://steveblank.com/2010/01/28/balloon-wars/