What he might have believed is that if the product really did take off, economies of scale might have cut the price enough to make the product viable.
The rule of thumb is that if you can increase the volume of production by a factor of ten, you can halve the unit cost of manufacturing the product. The catch is that you rarely know how you are going to do it in advance, and if you've established the market, somebody else may have the bright idea that lets them halve the unit cost of production.
The Germans did it with photovoltaic solar cells, but the Chinese did it again a few years later, leaving the Germans with a lot of plant for making solar cells that couldn't build them at a competitive price.
And you can learn that in psychology 101?
If you want to make things happen, you are always going to step on a few toes. The first rule of industrial diplomacy is "don't rock the boat". Of course, if nobody rocks the boat, your products become over- price and obsolescent and you go bust
But reading a book is a lot cheaper, and if you figure in repair time, much quicker.
My first year text-books were mostly American publications in exactly that style, and they were uniformly useless. The second and third year texts were thicker, duller and much more useful. I kept most of them. I didn't consult them more than once per decade, but I knew exactly where to look in them for the information I needed
cMine got borrowed by people taking the courses in subsequent years. I didn't bother borrowing anybody else's. From the questions that they were asking me, I knew that they wouldn't have been helpful. When I was working as a demonstrator in undergraduate practical courses as a graduate student, I got exposed to copied course work - groups of people all making the same mistake. Curiously, the people who got the stuff right tended express themselves in different words (one from another), or at least had enough sense not to copy the text they'd borrowed word-for-word.
I'd call that pre-exam cramming. I'd spend the last day before the exam doing old exam papers, trying to get a feel for the stuff I might not have prepared as well as I might, and getting a feel for how much I'd have time to write. It didn't always work. Once I got mouse- trapped by a question where I knew way too much, and found myself only half-way through my answer when time ran out. I had had the sense to answer all the other questions first.
But it wasn't what I was talking about. I was referring to episodes in our post-education careers when a problem comes up that needs stuff that was taught in University courses, but rarely comprehended - Laplace transforms come to mind. You then have to cram he subject well enough to be able to use the technique.