The Vision Thing: Why Do So Many Companies Lack It?

By Mike McGann
Posted Friday, January 12, 2007

I wish I could say this year’s Consumer Electronics Show was chock full of surprises and exciting announcements. Virtually everything announced at the show seemed to be, well, inevitable. LG’s combo Blu-Ray/HD DVD player was welcome news, but no surprise. Ditto for the Total HD disc format, both were written about here before CES opened.

If you watched the mainstream media, MacWorld, with its iPhone introduction and subsequent lawsuit made more headlines, both of which overshadowed AppleTV, which is a more aggressive attempt to bring 'Net content to the TV than we saw from Sony at CES. The number of big product introductions at CES seems down — looking for interesting things to post on this site has been a bit tougher than it would have been in years past.

And while some have said CES is too big, too expensive and seems to be following the late, unlamented COMDEX show into that good night, I don’t buy it. The biggest issue is that I think a lot of companies are confused about where things are going. The big TV makers have been getting slaughtered by little guys because they were too cautious about transitioning to flat-panel TVs, when they did, priced them too high. That’s why Vizio, Westinghouse and Sylvania are suddenly red-hot brands in the TV space.

Much like the audio industry, obsessed with the more power, better fidelity issue, missed the boat on the iPod, which arguably doesn’t sound as good as an ordinary CD, but is a ton easier to use, mainstream TV people missed the boat on flatscreen TV. In the audio world, people that I used to think were wise turned a deaf ear to how the iPod was transforming the listener experience and the marketplace. Now, many have embraced this technology with a-dollar-short-and-a-day-late kind of mentality and furiously manufacture or promote me-too products. Now, I'm watching the same thing in the video space.

What I’m not seeing is a lot of “what’s next?” Say what you will about former RCA boss Joe Clayton (now chairman of Sirius), but he always managed to have the vision to ask that question. Without him, there probably wouldn’t be millions of homes with tiny satellite dishes. Or Steve Nickerson, now with Warner Home Video, who pushed and pulled and dragged DVD out onto the market when he was with Toshiba, only to have it wildly exceed everyone’s wildest hopes, while explosively growing revenue for movie studios.

Where are the new versions of these guys? Beyond Apple’s Steve Jobs, I don’t see one in the consumer electronics industry right now. Too much is purely marketing driven and very little seems to be driven by vision, by making new markets where there were none before. Where are the guys in this business who are telling us where the industry will go and where it needs to go over the next five years?

The industry is boring, the magazines covering the industry play it safe and are boring. It's like watching march of the Zombie people, over and over again. Where's the genius? Where's the excitement?

Too many of the people in this industry could be selling cars or ketchup and it wouldn’t matter much to them. We need to see more passion, more excitement from the companies and the people at them, before we can expect to see more passion from the public at large.

Rest assured, it is going to happen. If the old-line companies continue to play marketing roulette, newer companies will step in and take over. There’s a grave yard filled with companies that were unable to adapt and compete. When was the last time you bought an Admiral TV?