Well, resolution, WDR, and low light have all become "me too" features, thanks to DahuaVision. They aren't going to win on any of those, and squeezing another decimal point out of their lux rating isn't going to the the head of the average integrator anymore, so it makes no sense to dump all their R&D cash into a low ROI spec race.
Manufacturers have three choices, all risky. They can figure out how to make their product cheaper, but that eats up their margin. They can figure out how to make their products more user friendly and easier to use, and maybe attract the end user market by selling their products direct over the web. Or they can make products that are increasingly niche, ensuring that in certain specific situations, their product is the only realistic option.
Hikvision and Dahua already won the race to the bottom, so pursuing that path is dumb and doomed to failure. Turning your surveillance manufacturing company into the next Apple is really, really tricky- for every Nest there's a half dozen orphaned Kickstarter projects. And selling direct to the end user is hard to do, you have to come up with effective marketing and create a tech support capability that can actually communicate effectively. FLIR is being successful here selling Lorex, but it's a lot of work. Or you can create a product that is a solution for problems integrators didn't know they had- but that requires imagination and vision.
This is a weird time for the surveillance business.