They should start caring about the customer. After all, we make their bottom line a reality.
Considering the speed at which technology is moving these days, if you don't hit your market right off the tee box, chances are decent that the market will simply pass your product by...
Take, for example, minidiscs. They were and are great technology. CD quality, but with the ability to record to them as easily as a tape player. Then, editing/shuffling capability like a CD-RW. It was great - but Sony wouldnt' liscense the technology (greedy) and they didn't have enough archived music (I guess) to sell pre-fixed music discs, like CD. The wave passed them by and they are a forgotten relic, replaced by the MP3 and the CD-RW. other factors, of course, influenced the failure (different discs made portability problematic, players were expensive, etc.).
I predict that High Def DVD will get surpassed by some better, more convenient, easier to use, product before it even gets off the ground. Ultimately, I don't think comsumers will suffer - they'll actually get a better product out of it. But in the meantime, our Sony dollars spent on Amps and receivers are being squandered in research that won't be paid back - that hurts consumers today and tomorrow in the form of higher priced components to recoup the losses.
