He tells me his first aim is to keep the product simple: to allow the space itself to be a basic platform with third party developers (my own Tumblr blog front end cost me about £10 from a specialist designer, though most people opt for the free customised version).
The potential for profit is significant, he believes, justifying the extraordinary front-end costs for New York.
Adding size to dwellings means amortizing these front-end costs over a larger area thereby reducing the cost per square foot.
This incompleteness reflects the high front-end costs of writing contracts that identify the entire universe of possible future states of the world and then specify the rights and obligations of the counterparties in each state.
And for those who bought into the idea that it's all about tackling the deficit, the exorbitantly expensive plans to reorganise the NHS and the heavy front-end costs of the new tuition fees are a telling demonstration of the small-state dogma behind the soundbites.
Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, is nearing its potential by allowing rapid prototyping and shorter production runs, greatly reducing front-end costs and making low-volume manufacturing more viable.
Importantly, it demonstrates that lower unit front-end costs do not always signify cost-efficiency and that investment in highly skilled therapy staff to deliver an intensive multidisciplinary programme may have the potential to pay for itself through reduced length of stay and increased throughput.
"We want to deter people not getting insurance because they look at the front-end cost of the premium and the deductible and they say, 'That's unaffordable,'" he said.
Over the long run, I'll be quite surprised if it does cost them any long-term profits, as opposed to the front-end cost of setting up the system and whatever the cost of maintaining it is, because if the viewers vote with the V-chip the way the Nielsen ratings and other indices drive programming today, it will change the programming, hopefully for the better.
Senior managers looking over financial data may mandate a strict reduction in pipeline inventory only to discover that squeezing costs at the front end just raises the costs of handling at the other, like a child squeezing one end of a balloon.
