What pisses me off the most about this is that the consumers are the real losers, here. What I'm hearing is, it is perfectly possible for all our lives to be better next time we search online for soft goods, but the system fucked up and killed this innovation. This is the opposite of everything the system is supposed to do.

If they don't plan to use this tech on their next startup, why don't they make it open source? Once something has been invented, it cannot be un-invented. Now that we know this is possible, I'm sure I am not the only one who, tonight, is going to start trying to replicate what they did. If they'd open source it, it would save someone else in the world a lot of wasted effort.