🚀 go-pugleaf

Matthew Dillon writes
    On the otherhand, if your product were sold closer to cost (e.g. $100
    instead of $500 as a random example), and the same sequence of events
    occured, the other company would have a much harder time taking away
    your market share because they would not be able to undercut you
    enough to Wow! the end user community.  You would be able to react
    without too much loss or at least have a longer period of time to
    figure the new situation out before you go red.

Also, if it's priced cheap, you may never get competition.  Not worth it to  
develope a competing product.

An EE friend of mine tells this story.  Any mangling of the facts are my fault:

This happened in the TV industry.  VHF tuners were difficult to design, and  
rather arcane to make.  One fairly small company in the very early days came up  
with a fairly good design.  They sold it to TV manufacturers at a small enough  
profit, that no manufacturer tried to design around their patent until solid  
state devices came around.