This is was basically what prompted this post. Those are basically bad excuses -- well we couldnt figure out how to sell a better UI because we designed and marketed ourselves into a hole that needs an ASIC to get out of so we have to bodge a trash UI until we can scrape enough pennies to design a new one / we weren't able to leverage the huge economies of scale of the consumer electronics industry and decided to do our own thing because???
Nimish, how much test equipment did you design?
How do you want to leverage consumer electronics economies of scale which are designed for products with the shelf life of maybe a year max (and to be thrown away when the battery finally dies) vs. test equipment where the same models are commonly sold (and supported, including replacement parts!) for 20+ years? Heck, it is starting to be impossible to find parts for devices that are 2-3 years old today.
And it is not because the company is unable to build something newer but simply because it both doesn't make economical sense (you really don't need fancy capacitive HD touch screen on a power supply or siggen sitting in an automated rack where nobody touches it during the entire lifetime of the setup) and because the customers demand them?
It just doesn't work like that.
A good company isn't really overly worried about "stealing" UI developments since they are able to compete and innovate faster than any fast follower. It's a basically a poor workman who blames the tools he made himself.
Yeah right. Tell that to Apple, for example. They are obviously a poor company because they are suing everyone left and right for the slide to unlock and rectangular slate shape of their phones ... UI is often the distinguishing feature of the product, so of course you don't want the competitors to just copy yours after you have possibly invested a ton of money in the design, usability research and what not.
I dont believe that keysight couldn't have engineered their way out of the issues with their legacy ASIC or used COTS parts. They clearly chose not to for reasons that are beyond me. Or maybe they truly do have poor engineering, in which case why not buy Chinese?
Do you seriously think that a company designs an ASIC at the costs of millions USD when they could just buy stuff of the shelf? Or redo their entire design, including all certification, whenever a new display model or CPU comes out so it doesn't look "legacy"? 
How many scopes on the market do you know that have the abilities of the Keysight/Agilent ones when it comes to waveform refresh rates and the response speed of the UI, even when a lot of sample memory is being used?
You don't need to be a chef to criticize the meal. Otherwise all the people reviewing multimeters here would be guilty of the same issue, right? And Dave too--how many scopes has he designed?
Apple's LAF suits in the 90s (they lost!) and other trade dress suits against Samsung (still going, years on) are basically considered some of Apple's stupider moves. They bogged the company down in revealing lawsuits and took time and press away from Apple's products while giving PR to their competitors. Lose-lose all around.
The point I'm making with using COTS stuff is that basically good *product* engineering says that you should focus on what the user wants and needs (they often don't know!) not what the engineers making the product want, like some sexy fpga design or cool ASIC. For example, Keysight's fully depreciated MegaZoom IV ASIC has cornered them into either admitting that 1000000 wfm/sec updates are marketing wank or they need to blow millions on a MegaZoom V. Smarter companies would have designed to a spec, then been able to swap out the tech as the market evolves, so they could use COTS to cut costs.
Furthermore, if you look at costs of COTS components, the fancy button panel and TFT LCD that John Kenny designed probably a) wasted a bunch of his valuable time b) cost more than taking a commodity capacitive tablet display and a few pots coupled with a common graphical UI c) can't be reused on any other tool without serious rework. All this means that despite him getting it designed down to cost, it's ultimately a one-off. Even he admits that Keysight has historically been quite bad at reuse.
I keep coming back to the r&s rtb2000 series because it clearly looks like R&S realized this and have developed a common chassis with touchscreen and a few multifunction knobs and buttons and can swap out the hardware to e.g. make that new spectrum analyzer. They can then use this commonality to drive a better graphical UI, and can put the economies of scale from having 1 display and 1 set of physical controls to use in paying for better components. Unfortunately they decided to piss on people in the UK and didn't offer their launch deal here otherwise I'd have been on it.
And, if they did it right, when the market demands 3d VR scopeview nextgen 5000+++ they can just swap out the display hardware rather than having it tightly coupled to their measurement engine, like with MegaZoom IV (seriously whoever decided that ought to be slapped, what a dumb move)
John Kenny even admits that NI does exactly this: they designed one really really really good voltmeter (I think) and then turn all their other measurement tools into frontends for that. They then spent time on making a decent (for t&m) software, labview (yes, i know) that they can sell for a much, much higher margin than any hardware.
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