You still ramble in the same track, ignoring very large groups of products.

Many times, the design is the major part of the development. And something the customer buys.

How come you never once in your post did respond about my examples? Because you just can't see anything but lamp timers? Because you can't see that the customer wants "something that sells well and makes $1,000,000/year in profit? That the custmer isn't interested in the display symbols, but that the market loves the product and buys it? That the customer requirements are not hard items you can measure or that they can represent with blueprints, but some form of values and feelings? Because you can't see any existence of anything that isn't industrial, automotive or military?

You talk about "sell" work in a way that totally proves that you haven't picked up the issue. The issue isn't to sell to the customer who buys the development. But to design something that the custmer feels will sell to the market. And the customer pays for the development of such a product. And the customer most obviously can't write down 10 sentences: "must be xx, yy zz and manage ww while costing $$ and that is enough to sell 100k items/year." So the customer can only try to give rough guidelines: "Buyer is 10-35 years old, male. Likes vehicles. Flashy interface is important since market research has shown that the majority of buyers wants to brag." Life expectancy of device 3 years - market life expected 18-24 months. ...

Or the customer may come and say: We have a product X. But so does 5 other companies. What can you do to either make our product significantly cheaper to produce while still matching the competitors products, or how can you develop a product that can be sold for similar money while beating the shit out of our competitors?

What makes one cable modem better than another? Why do people buy a specific WLAN access point? Multimedia player? Gaming keyboard? Bluetooth headset? KVM system extender? Car battery charger?

Don't you realize that many customers knows they need a product for a specific niche, but they can't just magically formalize the requirements for a product that gains them the market shares they are interested in? They may have to get the basic functionality presented in multiple prototypes to get feedback from presumtive buyers. The investors may be interested to develop just some prototypes to finger on, before they decides if they want to invest $$$ into a final - massproduced - product that they advertise and make sure is available in all your normal retail markets.

So whetever experience you have from a customer who wants a lamp timer isn't applicable to all people here who discuss their work with new products. And your claims about having all specificatins before agreeing on the work is totally impossible because the customer isn't buying carpenter time but sculptor time. He isn't buying machine shop time but design time. You obviously can't in detail describe to an artist exactly what he is going to paint - if you want a perfect copy of something existing, you should go for a photo...

You may complain to death about mobile phones, but the truth is that they have greatly changed our society (of course open for discussion if for the better or not). But obviously not by being total failures, as you make them out to be.

Basically, if summing all your posts they basically (constantly) says: All development processes that are different from mine are stupid, broken, failures. Any customer who behaves differently from mine are stupid failures wasting money. All products resulting from different development processes than mine are unusable failures. Always black or white. One color is you. The other color is everyone who isn't you or who isn't perfectly doing like you. Or thinking like you.

How many times, while doing your engineering, have you got back to the customer and discussed with them that if they do XX, they can get very valuable additional features out of their product with very limited cost changes in development time or manufacture costs? Or that feature X that they want to solve a specific problem isn't actually a good solution - dropping feature X (even if in the requirements specification) and instead introducing feature Y would also allow them to solve the original problem they had. Just in a different way. Potentially much more efficient. What feedback do you ever give your customers?