"27. Hardware/software hybrids. Most hackers find hardware projects alarming. You have to deal with messy, expensive physical stuff. But Meraki shows what you can do if you're willing to venture even a little way into hardware. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in hardware; you can often do dramatically new things by making comparatively small tweaks to existing stuff.

Hardware is already mostly software. What I mean by a hardware/software hybrid is one in which software plays a very visible role. If you work on an idea of this type you'll tend to have the field to yourself, because most hackers are afraid of hardware, and most hardware companies can't write good software. (One reason your iPod isn't made by Sony is that Sony can't write iTunes.)"

Not so much the next Flip Camera company, taking a market that major companies think is a toy. Instead, going head-to-head on their products that they've allowed to become crufty square-holes for your round peg and making great tools for real problems, not adapting commodity PCs in ludicrous ways.

And it's true, there's lots of poorly architected software out in engineering-land.

It's actually not that expensive to get a prototype done with many of the hardware resource available for either free (as samples) or dirt cheap in small quantities.

Say you want to build a new Gaming Router, you can buy the underlying hardware to do development on for under $200 in quantities of < 10 and that will give you all the needed parts (board, radio, antennas, cables, enclosure, etc.) with the right specs to do just about anything you want. You'd then run Linux on it (OpenWRT is easy, comparatively) and wright the necessary software on top of that.

As the Ideas point #27, linked to by ig1, shows, most of the problem solving is in software.

Give you an example, I worked for a startup, 3 software guys (myself included) built a router that had all the capabilities of a Cisco small business-class router in 6 months from getting the hardware to being feature complete. No hardware people were involved. We used a crappy, 3 year-old platform that would over-heat (the SoC would start to literally smoke) if we ran more than 2 IPSec connections, but we were able to tune the kernel and our software to make it a viable product for a lot of businesses.

If you know your way around Linux, building embedded products is unbelievably simple.

If you or anyone else is interested in talking more about this field, shoot me an email (it's in my profile).