I'm trying to think of a good example of where there may be a distinct and valid tradeoff between the cost to develop some technology versus the cost to deploy it.
This is for a book chapter on systems design that I'm almost finished writing. The point of the example is to get people familiar with the concept of questioning their assumptions about how much things will cost when they start designing for markets that are markedly different for the ones that they are accustomed to working in.
In this case I'm classifying "development" costs as, basically, the NRE costs involved in making the technology work, and the "deployment" costs as the costs involved in putting the technology into the hands of the people who are going to actually use it.
Examples would be talking by radio vs. talking by phone, or traveling by car (with a road system) vs. traveling by air.
Unfortunately, the examples that I'm coming up with all have other obvious tradeoffs that overshadow the develop vs. deploy one, or they have not-so-obvious development costs (for instance it's far easier to develop a phone line to go across town than it is to design a radio transceiver, but if you want to develop a phone _system_ that includes long distance and millions of subscribers, then you've got a lot more development effort than you would for a radio transceiver, etc.).
Suggestions welcome. I'm at the point of just throwing up my hands and not trying to cite any specific cases, or to change the underlying target of the example somehow -- posibly to per-user cost vs. deployment, or something like that.