I'm not sure that SonicBlue necessarily underestimated the amount of marketing needed. Maybe they knew exactly how much would be needed but were simply unable or unwilling to deliver it.

Exactly right.

But I would take it a step further... NO amount of marketing would have made the empeg a commercially viable product. When you consider the software development costs, and the actual cost of materials and construction of the unit, it is unlikely that even at $1000 apiece there would have been enough profit margin to support continued production.

Now, I know that this is absolute heresy, but I stand by it: the average car owner would not not want an empeg player in his car if you gave it to him for free. Try telling your Aunt Martha that she needs this great music player in her car -- and all she has to do is have a computer in her house, purchase and learn to use ripping and encoding software, be willing to drag her player into the house and connect up a bunch of cables and spend an hour or so every time she buys a new CD, not to mention spending hundreds of hours putting her existing CD collection into the empeg, oh, and lets not forget hundreds of dollars to buy an amplifier and pay some ham-fisted cretin at the local stereo shop to tear her Buick all to pieces in order to run wires and cables all through it... All this so she can listen to a few tunes when she drives to church on Sunday, utilizing a user interface so powerful and complex it takes a remote control with 24 buttons on it to operate. Yeah, right.

I think instead she would prefer to put the shiny round thing into the slot in the dash and turn the knob thingy to make it loud or quiet and be done with it.

This is not to say that the empeg/RioCar is not the absolutely best and greatest car stereo device ever built. But it's not for everyone. It's not even for one one-thousandth of one percent of everyone. And unless you are selling Ferraris or Bentleys, penetrating just .001% of the potential market is not a recipe for commercial viability.

tanstaafl.