You are missing the point.<p>You are thinking &quot;expensive&quot; is equal to &quot;more money&quot;.  Expensive, in this context, means far more than money.  For example, risk.  Sometimes company-ending risk.<p>I said &quot;R&quot; is expensive because it is often packaged with uncertainty.  You have no idea if something is going to work or if people will even be receptive to the product.<p>Take SpaceX&#x27;s landing rockets as an example.  Hard and very expensive research.  Lots of details nobody will ever know about.  Lots of failures before success.  And then, even with success, you have to make it repeatable and reliable.<p>One the &quot;R&quot; is done, &quot;D&quot; or building and scaling is, in relative terms, cheap.<p>Sure, it can cost billions to tilt-up a factory to build hard drives.  Yet, you have a product and you have a market.  You have an opportunity.  You didn&#x27;t have any of that before.<p>Wright Brothers:  Hard and expensive R&amp;D requiring YEARS of dedication.  Once everyone knew you could build such planes (and how to do it) the &quot;D&quot; was cheap because it was done.<p>Sikorsky and helicopters is another AMAZING example of that. Helicopters got launched because of the Sikorsky&#x27;s hard work and the unbelievable involvement of none other than Sergei Rachmaninoff (as in the pianist and composer) taking a leap and investing in the &quot;R&quot; that allowed Sikorsky to complete his work [0].<p>&quot;R&quot; is very expensive, in more than financial terms, that&#x27;s why the Chinese copy rather than innovate.<p>That we are allowing them to get away with it is, well, disturbing.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sikorskyarchives.com&#x2F;Igor_Sikorsky_&amp;_Sergei_Rachmaninoff.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sikorskyarchives.com&#x2F;Igor_Sikorsky_&amp;_Sergei_Rachm...</a>