That's true of products that are true innovations, that is, they create entirely new product categories. Here, however, he's just improving on an existing product. Getting opinions about what's wrong with the current product makes a lot of sense.
For sure. I've worked in finance and we did tons of market research when before giving loans to companies like Rite-Aid, CVS, etc, knowing that they did their own market research, too. But, I'm not sure how far that carries over to tech. Even "commodity" ideas aren't always so commodity in this sector.
