<i>&gt;and recoup their investments and so on. Guess what - the investment was already made, and it can&#x27;t be undone!</i><p>You&#x27;ve got the sequence of motivations and expectations of investments &amp; revenue backwards.<p>A more accurate timeline is that <i>before</i> the product is built, the businesses will segment the potential markets.  They estimate the various price curves of price-sensitive and price-insensitive customers <i>and then</i> use that to determine how much to allocate to each feature.  Some features are valuable to price-insensitive customers.  Some features are useful to all customers.<p>To say the above was &quot;investment already made&quot; is flawed because that perspective depends on reversing the timeline around in a way that businesses don&#x27;t actually think.  Instead of &quot;sunk cost&quot;, it&#x27;s actually a &quot;before-we-build-it calculated investment&quot; based on &quot;future revenue projections&quot;.<p>Likewise, when a pre-med student considers going to medical school, he may envision a future where he provides medical care for free in Africa <i>and</i> at the same time earn a $200k+ salary as a hospital surgeon.  Those future market segments affects his <i>current</i> decision to spend (go into debt) $150k+ for his medical degree.  When the doctor is 40-something, we, as patients can&#x27;t say that he should give us medical care for minimum wage because we morally deserve his services and his medical school tuition 10 years ago is a &quot;sunk cost&quot; anyway.<p>As for <i>how</i> a business delivers that segmentation of product to a customer, that is a separate issue.  Some methods are perceived as more distasteful than others.  The tig welder with a software config switch causes more outrage than a different physical chassis.