Actually, I thnk you will all find that just about every company that is large enough to have a legal department would respond similarily. My guess is that if the nine year old had written Sony or any other major company, the response, if there were any (and I will say that it is not all-together unlikely that Sony's response would be no response) would be to discourage "unsolicited ideas". Should they not pursue this course, they will find themselves in lawsuit after lawsuit in which the letter senders sue over the theft of their intelectual property i.e. the unsolicited idea. Since all these companies pretty much copy any innovation of their rival companies ASAP, you can bet that ipod will have most of the enhancements of the various sony players within a few upgrades anyway. On the other hand, Apple is a particularily pathetic company. At one time in the mid '80's I had nine different Apple II+/2c/clones running at my home. Apple decided to abandon the 6502 market without bothering to use a processor that would have served as a bridge between the 2x user and the new architecture (eventually a long line of macs). Having invested years of effort developing 6502 assembly language skills, I decided at that time I would never again buy an apple product. Any company that will not listen to their customers eventuall will not have to, the customers will be gone. Same can be said for Apple software, everything they develop is bloatware of a caibre rivaled only by the likes of the developments of Adobe and of m$ (microsloth/microsoft). Sony really gets no major points in the software catagory either, It seems that each release of Sonic Stage introduces more problems than it solves, most often because sony incorporates the DRM (Digital Rights Management) crap into every music file transfered to their players. Not entirely surprising since Sony is probably more worried about the money they make off of their music and movie royalites than they are about the poor saps that buy their hardware, but being realistic about what is going on, almost all companies sets their priorities with only their profit in mind. Long forgotten are things like pride in their product, customer satisfaction etc. etc. etc.
