It was always kind of frustrating to see the amount of brain power and tech going into the place I worked in Italy, www.CenterVue.com compared with typical 'web' startups. Those guys have computer vision, mechanical and electriconic engineering, and lots of software of various kinds. They're doing pretty well, but not nearly as well as plenty of way more "trivial" startups. I put trivial in quotes because it's never easy, but... you'd like to hope there's some correlation between effort and reward.
There is a correlation, but effort is a vector more than a magnitude. Lots of effort in the wrong direction gets you nowhere. Meanwhile small effort surfing on a trend can work quite well.
