[steve_adams_86]

I’m not sure if you’ve worked around hardware but a year is not very long in these environments, and that 5 year plan is less like a sensible, let alone obvious step to take and more like a crazy leap of faith.

You don’t know that vertical integration will guarantee that you’re more competitive, and the investment you need to make before you see a return is beyond 5 years. That’s not an easy bet to make. It looks obvious in retrospect, but it’s really not.

It requires quite a bit of in-housing that many of these teams aren’t yet well-versed in, so as you vertically integrate you’re also disrupting your internal structure while adding new people. It’s a lot to take on. Meanwhile, there are other long term plans underway already.

[jve]

Hm, reading this thread makes me realize that one of the reasons why Tesla/SpaceX/Starlink/Crew Dragon UI can move so fast is by using Linux all over the place.

Of course on itself it may not help, but along with other tricks like going agile with hardware does the job pretty well.

While others are doing their hardware iterations that last for years, software defined stuff may be easier.