1. CONTRASTING THEORIES OF MARKETS

2. Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose – and it is very significant that it does not matter – which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere, and that in consequence they must economize tin. ... the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin, but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all this without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all.
Friedrich von Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society

3. [A corporation] must exercise control over what is sold
[A corporation] must exercise control over what is sold. It must exercise control over what is supplied. It must replace the market with planning.
John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State
Long-range investing under rapidly changing conditions, especially under conditions that change or may change at any moment under the impact of new commodities and technologies, is like shooting at a target that is not only indistinct but moving – and moving jerkily at that.
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

4. Economists are at long last emerging from the stage in which price competition was all they say. As soon as quality competition and sales effort are admitted ... the price variable is ousted from its dominant position.
... in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not ... [price] competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (the largest-scale unit of control for instance) – competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives. This kind of competition is as much more effective than the other as a bombardement is in comparison with forcing a door …
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

5. CHANGES FROM 1990 TO 2000 List price of one robot unit -43%
List price of one robot unit
-43%
Number of units delivered
782%
Number of product variants that can be supplied to customers
400%
Total handling capacity (including gripper module)
26%
Repetition accuracy
61%
Speed of the 6 axes
39%
Maximum reach
36%
Mean-time between failures
137%
RAM in Mbytes
over 400 times
Bit-size of the processor
117%
Maximum number of axes that can be controlled
45%