If I walk into a restaurant and open the menu to be faced with 100 different choices: Italian, American, a little bit of this and a little bit of that I have learned it's time to run and find another. In my experience the more choices on a menu the more mediocre the food will be on an almost one-to-one basis. And the same seems true with high-end audio companies. Those that seem to have everything for everyone tend to turn out fairly mediocre products.
Oatmeal instead of eggs Benedict.
I think this is a classic case of manufacturers trying to fill holes in the marketplace with products that meet a certain standard but aren't exceptional - a trend that seems to be growing rather than shrinking in a tough economy.
At the proverbial end of the day it comes down to what you care about - building products for the marketplace or building products for the people that want to use them. That may seem like a semantic difference but I assure you it is not.
Most of us can tell when a product exists because it's extraordinary and when it's just there to meet a need. It may be tedious to ferret out the extraordinary from the mundane but I believe worth the trouble.
When manufacturer's focus on building products they want to own and then find a group of like-minded people to sell them to, the world's a better place.
Indeed.
