Have you ever worked on a long-term project designed for a hardware base which is currently cost prohibitive?
The feasibility of such a project would be dependant on the hardware being cost effective in ~5yrs . . .
If so:
- Did the project actually go into Production?
- Did it fracture in its Scope?
- Was it Abandoned?
The only time I've worked on projects like this they were all R&D: "cost-effective in 5 years", on a typical product development cycle means "write it now" because it's going to be the Next Big Thing (tm).
Apple was probably working on the iPhone for years, waiting for the hardware to become cheap enough. There are projects like these that do happen in the real world.
I will answer with a question:
Remember lots of projects fail, and many times is because they were too big/large. Of course, this would vary depending on which company you have, and how effectively you can raise capital for these type of projects. Also make sure to not put all the eggs in the same basket.
Lots of things can happen in such a long period of time.
Update: On the other hand, games are a repeated example of pushing technology to its limits, and taking into account the hardware will come to buyer's budget by the release time. It (usually) isn't a 5 year cycle though.
I have worked on several projects that tried to overcome existing hardware limitations, by doing things cheaper and faster with a simple hardware. By the time the projects went live, the "expensive hardware" was not expensive anymore.
I have worked on such a project. Usually with a project like that, you aren't under as much pressure to get to market fast but instead are focused on being already present in the space by the time the hardware reaches a nice penetration for the end users.
Difficulties arise in that you need the hardware yourself to properly develop for it, which of course is expensive if you have many developers.
Did the project actually go into Production?
Our product was finished but the hardware still doesn't have high adoption.
Did it fracture in its Scope?
Scope was reduced because of lack of adoption. But features can be added later if it takes off.
Was it Abandoned?
No, just toned down the ambition...
You have to be careful that the hardware is actually adopted down the road. Things change so rapidly or go in completely different directions than what you anticipate that it is sometimes best to work on a subset of the original grand plan.
Several friends of mine have worked on projects like this, of the three I know off two went into production and one was dropped as the technology leap-frogged their development prototype within a couple of years.
The projects that went through were for systems used by ftse 100 organisations giving services to their customer base, they weren't directly sold to the end user (who sees them as a product of their supplier not the actual developer) and so had a protected investment structure. i.e. The project/prototype was sufficient to get funding to deliver over the long term.
This business model was actually rampant during the dot com bust. Company A thought it would provide an email service for free and once it has a million users it could cross-sell other services or add on some premium features. If even 10% users sign on that would still generate a good residual monthly income from a 100K users. But as soon as Company A goes premium another company would come out with the same model offering the same services for free and Company A's model collapses. Company A then might resort to increasing switching costs and locking people in (even though email has a high switching cost this didn't work but that's another discussion).
The reason I bring this up is that this is exactly what you could be facing down the line. You could make a strong case for sustaining for 5 years but if a company comes out 4 years from now and does a really good job of the same thing, you've just lost a lot of time and money but they got in cheap. Even if your service's switching costs are high and your users are locked in, it's entirely possible that the new company might offer a migration path to circumvent just this scenario. And you could then take measures to really hijack the user's data but that's not that easy and it would lead to negative publicity from frustrated users (they feel their data is theirs to take).
Since your question is quite general, I can't provide much feedback but unless the scenario is really compelling it's a hard road to tread upon. Even if Larry Page approached me with a search engine idea, I'd want to know the monetization strategy (but patents provide a safety net--see below).
There is also the question of employee morale. Employees don't get nice perks and bonuses because you're always strapped for cash and they always feel that the reward is too far out. You will end up giving out a lot of stock options and raising multiple rounds of investments which won't be easy.
Patents gives you a safety net in that when five years from now it becomes feasible, you can execute on your idea and still have exclusivity. And even if you fail to execute (or don't execute well), you may take comfort in the fact that someone else might be able to execute better, while you can get dividends.
Despite that, if you really want to get this thing out there, you might be able to throttle your costs by making it an invite-only beta so you won't end up mushrooming your costs. It will also provide you with a platform that you can mature over the years and as hardware becomes more affordable you can continue to issue more invites.
5 year is eternity in IT business. Predicting what will happen in 5 years might be really hard. For example did anyone expect 5 years ago, that scalable grid computing (aka cloud), will be cheaply available to anyone?
As for real world examples, well as Joeri noted, Apple is good example. For example they've counted on cheap Motorola G5, which never happened, they've put PCI-X in PowerMacs, which never really took off, in early Macs they had SCSI, which they've expected to dominate desktop, now there are SATA disks even in servers.
We had a project which had desktop sharing and video conferencing, identical to Webex. Even though we had built our own lightweight protocols, over dialup it was very slow (but faster than webex at the time). Once we realised this was a broadband app, the investor pulled out as essentially nervous that no-one would adopt broadband! We would have only had to have waited 2 years for the technology to come, but the dot com bubble had burst and things seems very negative for the internet in general at the time. Seems ridiculous now doesn't it.
To answer your specific questions: