I think I've mentioned a time or two that sometimes I'll have An Idea Whose Time Has Come, not have the time and resources to do anything with it, and then a couple of years later learn that someone at, e.g., IBM had the same idea at the same time.
(The cordless keyboard for the PCjr was one of these, though I was kinda-sorta ripping off Arthur C. Clarke if memory serves - taking a gimmick from a sci-fi novel and tweaking it just enough to be practical. Someone at IBM either read my mind or read the same novel, or maybe it was just an idea whose time had come.)
Anyway: there's a Thing that I've had on the drawing board for a couple of years now, even going through a couple of iterations of circuit design, but it's never quite seemed useful enough, nor producty-enough, for me to gets boards fabbed, install parts on them, and get busy with firmware development. (This could change soon, as there's potentially an impending need for such a Thing.)
Well, at RTECC this morning, I had a chat with one of the exhibitors, and their new-real-soon product is, from a hardware perspective, a Thing very much like mine. Difference is, they've got a team of firmware developers, and a business plan that involves selling the hardware with a baseline firmware load, and then selling firmware upgrades for special additional capabilities.
During the chat, though, I did come up with a potentially interesting business model, that basically involves changing an arm and a leg for the hardware and standard firmware (keeping everything closed-source), and then running a for-money on-line service whereby clients and their customers to sign in securely and enter function definitions to be compiled for the Thing (which is a sort of special-purpose test instrument, for a niche market, and typically used in acceptance testing).
Sorry, no specifics. Tinfoil time. Besides, I just came up with a further way of making the Thing look like it's an expensive piece of lab equipment, the better for Test Engineering to get it past Purchasing.
Comments