The falling rate of profit, and attempt to maximize profit, as well as technological innovations and a few other minor factors have forced manufacturers into two main directions:
Standardization:
No longer is it profitable to have components of a product to be built in-house by any given manufacture's own design and specifications where they would have to absorb the cost of R&D and manufacturing as well as maintaining a fleet of supporting factories for non-essential parts and segments of a product. It just cuts into profits and worse yet, others can do it better. As an example, Nikon can make the camera, but Leica M provides better lenses than Nikon can.
Modulation:
Effective modularization of a system, and portioning each device to a smaller daughterboard and sub system would vastly reduce the cost of remain and maintenance. Imagine data acquisition systems that have a main body and may be a single screen, but they can accommodate an array of modules. Such a system once...
