Reflections on the hardware industry

> That "turnkey" approach in the intermediaries is probably getting in the > way of more innovative and diverse potential downstream customers having > their desires aggregated into big contracts at the 1M+ scale.
>
> There's an opportunity in that, but I've no idea how to go about
> fulfilling it.

The whole situation sounds similar to past ones where IBM was in the position to tell its customers what their best interest were and consequently the market routed around IBM. Same with Microsoft where the very powerful, new, innovative approach to route around the entity blocking the ecosystem through its market monopoly inertia was consequent open source SW.

Open Source HW where innovative end of the chain companies can expand and adapt and fix the HW designs to their need and by feeding them back lower their long-term costs seems like a logical answer to today's deaf chip makers. However whether the opened path will add enough advantage at low enough cost and how long it will take to reach comprehensive market capacity seems unscrutable. ?