You can innovate in the lab all you want but if no one is buying your product because it doesn't answer the right problems is it that innovative. I thought the AIBO robot was interesting but not thousands of dollars fabulous, you can get a proper, pedigreed dog for that price.
They have a nasty habit of bringing things to market to fast and then not properly supporting it. Then when the consumers walk away they blame everything else but themselves.
AIBO was a big missed opportunity. The unit cost was too high, and the software not advanced enough. But those things can't have been having a huge effect on their R&D budget. They could have kept the same mechanical design, but increased CPU/memory each year, with corresponding work on the AI for minimal pain, reducing the price and improving the utility each year. If that work had continued constantly, we would have some truly remarkable AI pets available by now, which would make the ultimate toy for young children that live in apartments. That same technology could then have been applied to home automation robots. Instead we have Roomba.
Like you, I thought AIBO was far ahead of its time. So far that I assumed Sony was using it to improve their AI and would release better products based on the feedback. Except, they never did. They had a product that everyone saw wasn't going to sell well and just killed it when exactly that happened.
I wonder if their business case to support just such an ongoing effort counted on a stronger reception in their domestic market--there is a strong cultural affinity in Japan for robots, and crowded conditions that make pet ownership more challenging. The time the AIBO was in the market was a continuation of the austerity driven lost decade(s), with GDP growth of a little over 1% annually.
On the other hand, as demonstrated through this thread, there is little tech that Sony hasn't seen capable of messing up.
Or to give a slightly cheaper example:
Sony Tablet S and P.
Both were experiments,as in - tablets with a very unusual form factor, released to see if the market will accept them. And while the Tablet P was a failure, Tablet S sold quite well - and what Sony did? Abandoned it. The only available update to Android 4.0 leaves all users with slow system on an otherwise nice device, but worst of all - it has a locked bootloader,so you can't even put a custom rom of a newer version. A cool device released quickly, and just as quickly abandoned.
They have a nasty habit of bringing things to market to fast and then not properly supporting it. Then when the consumers walk away they blame everything else but themselves.