I agree that DJI is a robotics company, and as somebody who has been keeping a close eye on the consumer drone market, it seems they are practically impossible to compete with.
DJI is a great consumer robotics company, but they're built on top of a mass amount of experience gained from the DIY world, and this can't be underestimated for its residual effects .. sure, you can buy a DJI consumer product anywhere for a few grand, but for the price of a single DJI you can build yourself a small fleet. And I think that is where they are going to get their competition from, ultimately .. the RCGroups.com crowd.
I dunno, I am doing exactly this right now. Rather than by a DJI spark for £500 I'm building my own micro drone.
current expenses are at about £100 for the frame, motors, ESC, and flight controller, but I already own a transmitter and receiver that I'm reusing, so add another £100 minimum for that (probably more tbh). Then factor in that so far I've not brought the LiPo batteries or chargers, so add another £50. Then factor in I'm not putting any cameras on it yet, so add another £100 for a fpv camera, 5ghz transmitter and receiver. And the spark does more than that would provide, to match the spark you'd also need to add a second HD camera, and gimbal, so maybe another £100 if you buy low cost parts (I'm not currently seeing any diy parts that can do what the spark does I.e live view and recorded HD video with one camera, hence the two cameras needed). So that's £450 now.
And then consider that the spark comes with a smart phone app, GPS, and a bunch of nifty easy to use features that are way ahead of what clean flight/betaflight open source controller software currently does.
Perhaps the balances of the economics are different for the more expensive DJI drones, but to me the spark seems very well priced for what it does. I wouldn't be building one myself if I wasn't at least as much interested in the fun of the project than the final result.
I suspect that it's a lot like building your own PC these days.
Around the end of last year I decided that I needed to replace a couple of very venerable DIY Windows boxes I had for gaming and other purposes. I started pricing out CPUs, graphics cards, motherboards, and so forth and I ended up just buying a big Alienware laptop. It fit into my environment better, was certainly fast enough, didn't cost much more, and was just less hassle.
I've spent many, many hours building PCs but I was sort of "been there done that" about doing it again.
I've been flying things for 30+ years, and the one thing I have learned in this hobby/field is that the cycle goes like this:
1: Build -> 2: Fly -> 3: Crash (goto 1)
DJI are turning this into:
1: Buy -> 2: Fly -> 3: Crash (goto 1)
All of these phases are ripe for disruption in my opinion. Maybe you'll find that building is way more fun than flying (crashing) - in which case, you can ship Step #2 off to someone else to deal with .. ;)
.. and there are 10's of thousands of people out there who can just roll their own drones. Doesn't mean DJI isn't going to succeed - just that this is where they'll get their competition from.
