I think 49.9% of executives agree with that and 90%+ of product people/developers agree with that too. The problem is that it's rarely X and Y. It's almost always justifiable, though. Imagine X=1 and Y=100.
If you sell 1 and a customer asks for 100 it's easy to say no. If they ask for 50 or 25 it's still easy.
The problem is when they ask for 2. Or 1.5, and are willing to pay big bucks to get it. It's hard to know whether your line should be at 2 or 20 or 80, especially when you can make business arguments for all of them and they all come with buckets of money attached.
Oh, yes, it's a difficult call. The customer might even start in with this (stop me if you've heard THIS one before): "Hey, we'll pay all your NRE for you and you get to sell it to everyone else including our competitors as part of your product!!"
Do this, and your product people (if you have any) will all quit, and your engineering talent will start thinking "If we're just another custom engineering consulting company now, why don't I just go over to one of the big consulting firms and make actual money doing the same thing?
But there are cases (my common case) where something the customer wants is really a great idea and many other customers would benefit (and we would have eventually gotten there). So it's not always a bad thing :)
Well, no. There can't be thousands of "the big consulting firms".
But more than that, I'm pretty sure the point of the question was to get a list of such firms (I'd like one too!), not to be assured "they're out there, even if you'll never know who they are or how to find them".
If you sell 1 and a customer asks for 100 it's easy to say no. If they ask for 50 or 25 it's still easy.
The problem is when they ask for 2. Or 1.5, and are willing to pay big bucks to get it. It's hard to know whether your line should be at 2 or 20 or 80, especially when you can make business arguments for all of them and they all come with buckets of money attached.