Neither. Robots are bottlenecked on ROI, and the fact that humans remain massively cheaper than robots for many jobs, both on average and on the current margins.
Software has a pretty short ramp to profitability—even when it’s not obvious exactly how it’ll pay off, there are so many applications that simply couldn’t be done before that something is going to work.
Hardware has a longer ramp, and needs more clarity of payback before starting.
Also, software benefits from generality much more than hardware does. The tradeoffs in complexity and maintenance for software get overwhelmed by more use cases. Those same tradeoffs in hardware make it vulnerable on all fronts to purpose-built machinery that does fewer jobs, but does them much more cheaply or reliably.
Neither. Robots are bottlenecked on ROI, and the fact that humans remain massively cheaper than robots for many jobs, both on average and on the current margins.
Software has a pretty short ramp to profitability—even when it’s not obvious exactly how it’ll pay off, there are so many applications that simply couldn’t be done before that something is going to work.
Hardware has a longer ramp, and needs more clarity of payback before starting.
Also, software benefits from generality much more than hardware does. The tradeoffs in complexity and maintenance for software get overwhelmed by more use cases. Those same tradeoffs in hardware make it vulnerable on all fronts to purpose-built machinery that does fewer jobs, but does them much more cheaply or reliably.
This sounds like you are describing robotics being bottlenecked on hardware to me.
Yeah, I am. But more bottlenecked on cost and flexibility (ability to shift from use case to use case) than directly on capability.