There seems to be two natures to technology. In some cases, it is accessible to startups and inspires innovation. In other cases, you can’t even get your foot in the door without an initial outlay of huge amounts of investment. I refer to the former as “grass roots” and the latter as “feudal”.
When a particular technology is in a grass roots state, people aren’t afraid to try it out, tinker with it to see what they may come up with. Who knows, you may even invent something cool. Most grass roots technology these days is well supported by open source ecosystems.
On the other hand, when a technology is in a feudal state, you have to be well established and of a size sufficient that the initial outlay to invest in it is not prohibitive to your organization. Even so, there usually has to be a strong business objective towards a large enough scale of production to consider it. In some cases, a product runs through pilot stages using grass roots technology, but you have to go the feudal route in order to benefit from economy of scales of higher volume production.
Examples of grass roots technologies accessible to anyone are the PIC and AVR (Microchip) microcontroller technologies, the whole Arduino ecosystem and even the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. Examples of feudal technologies, well just try doing business with Broadcom or Qualcomm. You won’t get them even answering your calls unless you are big enough to perk their interest. Or try getting into automotive electronics and see just how quickly you will be buried in regulatory red tape.
Ironically, we often associate “Skunkworks” with a grass roots mindset but in reality, the name came from experimental work done using very “feudal” aerospace technologies.
Sometimes a feudal ecosystem helps, usually in a highly regulated technology niche, especially where it involves extensive research and development among a handful of high-end players, for example 5G cellular where you probably don’t want household “hackers” all connecting random devices directly to the network. You want them to have to at least use modules that have been certified for the cellular networks.
Sometimes you luck out and you create your own grass roots technology. I have fond memories of a time working on systems using Intel 80188. We had discovered that certain off-the-shelf DOS “C” compilers generated object code that could be made ROM’able using the right tools. We even wrote a few in-house tools to help. We even used C++ back in the days before they came up with an Embedded C++ spec. We used Novell networks before connecting to the Internet, and had diskless network booted PCs (before the days of the Windows registry). But IIRC correctly, this was still after a number of years using the more “feudal” Intellec (big blue) boxes and huge emulators to initially get into it.
So what would you say is the nature of the technology that you work with? Is it something that you can buy an inexpensive kit and work with it when working from home? Or is it something that requires you be in an expensively equipped lab to even do anything?