Re: NAMM - report
Unless you look at the control software for the VSX26/VSX48, which never made it out of beta and never included the promised "live" control. They promised it before they had built it, ran in to problems, and poof!
Granted though, I agree this is not common practice for them.
With thousands of SKUs and decades of history, I'm sure there are many more examples.
I recall seeing products that never made it out of show prototype stage, but showing product too soon can be counter productive when more nimble competitors can copy your innovative features and beat you to market (seen that too).
I don't know the inside information on the VSX product, but it sure looks like a design that wasn't finished, because the design asset (the software coder) left the reservation, either literally if he was an employee or contractually, if an outside consultant, or maybe he was hit by lightning.
I am not making excuses for this, apparently it was an attractively priced product with a lot of demand. I do understand how difficult it is to get another coder to just pick up, where the first designer left off and finish.. who knows maybe the original designer bit off more than he could chew and couldn't deliver what he promised... It's easier to deliver on some basic functionality than the advanced features if the foundation isn't robust. I ran into that before with an old Peavey/AMR SMPTE machine synchronizer using an outside consultant. I still get angry thinking about that one, because i was the guy getting beat up at trade shows for his failure to deliver.
I could probably list more examples, but I don't see a pattern of trying to deceive the marketplace, more like trying too hard to deliver attractive value product and failing here and there from over reaching.
if it was easy to make them cheap and not suck, everybody would do it...
JR