That's a
problem every
company working with
atomic products (not
radioactive, but
material, made of
atoms, not
bits) have. Software can be rewritten easily (most of the time, or provided enough time), but huge factories that rely on very expensive machines are not easy to
substitute.
You can apply that adage to the struggle of the chip industry for creating new kind of processors which will produce less bugs and less heat. They will use the only tool they have, silicon, instead of researching new ways of solving the problem (see the Transmeta project).