So I am definitely making a development-centered critique. Partly that&#x27;s because most of my experience is in development, and I have very little experience in high volume product or DTC. However, I also think that the software problem is a whole lot wider than design, and that the state of software for hardware companies as a whole (including logistics!) is abysmal.<p>Distribution of physical product to stores is something unique to consumer goods, and for physical hardware I think that landscape is currently experiencing a great deal of change. Even ignoring marketplaces like Amazon, we&#x27;re starting to see the emergence of distribution &#x2F; fulfillment as a service, and the burden of entry into the online retail market is much lower. Many very successful hardware startups have gone in this direction first, only arriving at brick-and-mortar retail stores once the company is large enough and established enough to spare the resources to keep that up.<p>Logistics and supply chain management are basically managed by software at this point, but because there&#x27;s no effective integration between software (even packages that have the integration botch it) means that it&#x27;s actually in some ways made into a harder problem because the data is stored in 10 &quot;convenient&quot; places rather than a single unconvenient place.<p>The fast followers &#x2F; competitors problem is, I think, actually a bigger problem for the software industry than the hardware industry, with the exception of offshoring. If you offshore, particularly to China, and don&#x27;t have a very good relationship with the factor(ies) you&#x27;re working with, this is a very real risk, if the entirety of the widget is being produced by that one factory. With more complex widgets, this risk is substantially mitigated. In general I&#x27;d say this is more a function of the quality and uniqueness of the product coupled with your execution on it than something inherent to hardware. This is not, however, a problem that good hardware software will solve. The ability to rapidly develop things will actually make this worse. I don&#x27;t have a problem with that! Execution is everything, even in entrenched industries, and Davids have always managed to topple Goliaths.<p>Regulation is also, in my mind, being held up by software. There&#x27;s certainly a component that&#x27;s out of your control - once you fire off the paperwork, you just sit and wait - but there&#x27;s a lot you can do to smooth the approval process on your own end, and a lot of that has to do with proper design documentation, which is once again suffering from terrible software.<p>I&#x27;m not trying to say that having better software for hardware will fix everything. It certainly won&#x27;t. But, I do think it is the single greatest limiting factor by far in hardware production. I would estimate it consumed 80% of my productivity or more. It&#x27;s an astounding timesuck.