Tudor Brown explains that Acorn as the starter were ARM-engineers first employer, that Acorn´s first big project was to develop a computer for BBC in 1983.

That is an common first project in many later commersially well going companys that they have started with a project for a government owned company or other non-commercial organisation.

And one commercial flop can make another project or product to be well selling product.

For instance Nokia started with radio telefony in 1969 were the customers were especially oil searchers in Siberia, Nokia was from the beginning only a papermill company at the river Nokia in Finland, later they started with rubber as rubber footwear for wet weather and after that tires for cars and after that electric cabels.

Boken om Nokia aka The book about Nokia from 1999 by the two finnish economy journalists Mosse Wallén and Stefan Bruun (finnish-swedish spoken in Helsinki) explain the history of Nokia.

ARM Holdings licensing business modell is one of ARM´s strongest benefits for beeing a god competitor to Intel and of course their know-how of architecht extreme power efficient processors for mobile phones as battery driven appliances.