The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

Re:The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what cus... by JumpCrisscross on Monday April 18, 2022 @06:21PM (#31077377)

> like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...)

This is a good analogy. How many companies say “I’ll build a sweet motor and then find a customer for it”? They don’t. They build the motor for the application. (More often, they build something close to the final product.)

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Re:The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what cus... by murderfs on Monday April 18, 2022 @06:48PM (#31077653)

That's only true in extremis: it's not even completely true of car/industrial motors! Companies like Cummins design motors that are used in all sorts of applications, e.g. https://www.cummins.com/engines/qst30

When you look at smaller motors (e.g. DC motors in handheld consumer products), they're basically jellybean parts targeted towards the highly specific use case of making a shaft turn.

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Re:The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what cus... by riversflow on Monday April 18, 2022 @08:00PM (#31078271)

> They don’t.

Wrong. They absolutely do. In fact I’d wager the vast majority of motors are essentially commodity goods. Even if you were thinking of just combustion engines, its really not the case, most engines get reused many times. Which makes sense, its an outsized engineering problem to optimize so you’d want to maximize your return.

For example. https://www.mcmaster.com/electric-motors/

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