Also, there is a good deal of marketing involved. If we're making analogies, consider the CMOS chip thing. A manufacturer makes an outstanding CMOS chip for DSLRs, and uses it as marketing leverage, basically brainwashing users that a CCD chip is inherently worse/inferior to a CMOS one. Then, it doesn't matter anymore if the competition invests in CCD R&D and makes fantastic progress - the market has been already poisoned, users will demand CMOS as 'everyone knows CCD sucks'. So our competition has to go CMOS to sell (and play catch-up with the original CMOS manufacturer), regardless how well their CCD research is progressing.