Someone brighter than me should do a case study on the business...

Someone brighter than me should do a case study on the business model this company has chosen to adopt. Weird that they have decided to be so monopolistic and are shooting to simply replace, at price parity, the existing fire assay technology rather than be the disruptive power they clearly could be if they wanted to be. Imagine if they rolled out their machines at such a rate that they and the assay companies could in the near future offer assays of superior quality to that of fire assaying, cheaper than fire assaying, with results being returned in hours not weeks or months. That would change the whole pig in the poke nature of current mining (with each new drill hole being a response to the latest assay results rather than like pinning the tail on the donkey). I'm a bit surprised that the CSIRO is going along with such a greedy short sighted strategy.

Their claim that there is only a demand for some 640 of these machines globally is a bit of a faint echo of IBM's projection that there would be demand for only 500 computers globally. Not suggesting that there will be a PhotonAssay machine in every home but why not one with every drill rig?