I’m not saying everything they do is terrible and a massive waste of corporate money, but look through most of their work:
The amount of work that actually trickles down to stuff that we would see is surprisingly small. If you look though their work the amount of consumer electronics type stuff is fairly minimal. I think I own one of the WD hard drives that they designed.
So you can’t say they haven’t done anything, it’s just stuff that they’ve done may be beyond what we see. They might design a killer medical terminal or orthopedic bone saw, but we aren’t surgeons.
For example IDEO thought up Jetblue’s “Even more leg room”, which as a 6’4 person I love. But is that a product? No…it was just a way of removing a row of seats and charging everybody else more to make a few people happy, and that’s fairly clever.
It’s just a lot easier for us to look at a company like Astro and say “Oh I love those headphones, or Oh you guys designed the Xbox!”