Thoughts from a "prosumer":
1) Market stability - What is best for the industry is stability and product availability. I purchased a number of Axis cameras for my own home a year ago assuming they were as stable as any company out there - hoping to avoid long-term, overpriced VMS licenses. I actually started with Logitech Alert cameras for my small application using the same logic. Now, I am 0 for 2 (hard to know Axis' future). Any time you are selling a product at a consumer level many times above its reasonable price, a group like Hikvision will drive the pricing down. That's a market economy for you, and is what made your big-screen TV, car, cell phone and personal computer possible and affordable. Hikvision is filling the gaps in the market (financially and otherwise), and driving down prices through efficient production processes. All the other companies are using the same factories, so production techniques are pretty standardized across the whole technology industry.
2) Ignoring consumer market - The other major industry problem is their lack of vision (no pun intended). The industry is too worried about forcing consumers to hire outside firms for installs/updates, that only a fraction of consumers interested in home surveillance will achieve their goal. If a local surveillance store would actually let me see cameras, talk to them about options, etc. - I may hire them or at least buy the cameras from them. Getting consumer flow through your store is a good thing since retail pricing is higher than wholesale. Surveillance software is stuck in the 1990s, and an intelligent voice would be valuable. But that is not possible since I do not want to pay an installer to hook a CAT5 cable into my camera. Best Buy is not selling sufficient technology, so I have to order online and trust this site. Thanks IPVM! There will always be mid-to-large applications that need professional installs. Industry has to stop ignoring their largest potential purchaser - the consumer. And stop calling me an "end-user". Can you imagine if your phone company talked to you like that?
3) Volume - The industry needs to move from a low-volume/high-price-per-unit model, to a high-volume/reasonable-price model with retail sales operations. Consumers are the solution! With significant upgrades in technology happening every few months, people won't spend $1000 on a camera in the future. Every company depending on overly high-priced cameras will collapse. The past year is just the beginning. In 1985, IBM was the #1 company selling larger corporate installs and using archaic software. Now Apple is #1 selling great hardware/software directly to consumers. I hope the surveillance industry recognizes their current business model is not sustainable.
NOTICE: This was moved from an existing discussion: Is It Time For Me To Start Selling Hikvision?