In concept, of course, being able to carry one small device that does everything in a briefcase or purse is something that all customers would say they want. But it is rare that there are no technological trade-offs to adding diverse functionality to a product. Software makes it less expensive to tailor a single physical platform to do a range of focused jobs. Our proposition, however, is that even in this situation, a company would do better by using one single hardware platform to market different software-defined, optimized products that are positioned on different jobs. It is likely that
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