"Good Enough" is not good enough.

Here's why:

In business strategy there is a principle called "entry and exit barriers" that have to do with how easily competition can arrive to compete. Competition is bad for profits and its in your interest to make it hard for them to elbow up.

If you are really out to make money with microcontroller skills, this is something you have to consider - greatly. The problem is that we learn to code in environments that are not really capitalistic - schools or starting out working for people that don't know good code from bad. In school, good enough for a A is good enough. The professor will not give you stock options for a really good project. The motivation is to get done and study for the Statistics exam. This is NOT the real world.

The other way we tend to learn is working for companies that do contracts for others. Here the motivation is to give the customer the minimum you need as quickly as possible to cash his check. The customer is usually ignorant of the process and couldn't tell the difference. Here again, Good Enough to get paid is sufficient.

Now, lets talk about that nirvana where microcontroller experts are aledged to get rich on their knowledge... here the objective is to come up with something that others haven't figured out and to get customers to pay them sums for that product before others figure out how you did it.

Is Good-Enough, good enough? No. Non-innovative products can only grab the big bucks for a few months before someone else offers a competitive product. The way to make money is to release a product that few can compete against. The farther down that learning curve you are beyond potential competition, the more dissuaded they are to follow. Companies look for the best cash opportunities for the effort; if you make it hard for them to follow, they'll choose other markets to focus upon.

Now, re-examining the contractor situation. The company that hires them needs a product that can keep their competition away. If you hand them a Good-Enough design, you'll get paid but they won't succeed and won't come back. In that, many are largely mining for dumb-companies to make money from until they're all gone. I think the supply is endless - many will be glad to hear. :)

However, if your customer get a product that wows them and is easy to manufacture, profitable, and complex enough that the competition isn't quick to follow... they make money and survive long enough to gratefully bring you more contracts. Business-wise this process is enhanced to your advantage *IF* you have a stake in the sales volume of the customers' product. The only thing better is to manufacture and sell an OEM product of your own. :)

aka j