The end result is that NASA is still using computers from the 60s, and it took someone like Elon Musk to change the status quo which resulted in reduced costs (which is why NASA is currently contracting SpaceX, which can do things cheaper).
NASA uses the RAD750 [1] as well as a few other still in production CPUs. Remember Voyager? The satellite is still flying and sending back priceless data after many decades? To launch missions (and critical infrastructure like GPS) you need years, decades even, for usage & reliability data to accumulate and industry to perfect the manufacturing process of parts that can handle environments that are, by any definition, at the extremes. But, please, show me a mission launched in the last 5 years with a 50 year old CPU design.
One of the things the Deep Space Industries people were feeling confident about was they were signing all their contracts to have a 1/3 success criteria - they could launch 3 spacecraft, but would have fulfilled the contract if only 1 succeeds. That little bit of leeway, they think, will allow them to try new things and definitely lower costs.
Obviously some of this you can't do with manned missions, but its still a big cost saver when you change how you balance the equations. One of the things driving the CubeSat movement at the moment is the ability to fail - the low cost is encouraging people to take non-spacerated components, launch them, and see what happens, which then turns them into space-rated components (for a given mission envelope).
He thinks that, save for a few critical infrastructure missions, the diminishing returns get to such an extreme that they add no benefit to most missions. However, because NASA has to play politics for an ever shrinking pie, they can't afford to take no-brainer risks like launching ten missions instead of five because four failures looks worse than two, even if they both represent 40% failure rates.
And they're also contracting Orbital Sciences and Sierra Nevada and Boeing and probably a bunch of others of whom I have no knowledge.
SpaceX is following in the footsteps of many other private companies that have developed spaceflight hardware on their own initiative. They might be 'younger' and more agile but it's not a new innovation.