You're right about that, Horses, as indeed the article's author acknowledges: "Keeping things in perspective, true Android enthusiasts -- the kind of people who care about this stuff -- make up a small percentage of customers." However, some issues do have the potential to affect everyday users as well, especially the fact that "Verizon's grown notoriously bad about providing timely OS upgrades to its devices," as the author notes.
japetty notes the basic economic factor: as long as VZW's technological lameness doesn't have a negative effect on its bottom line, they're not going to improve. Theoretically, businesses have three constituencies: the owners, the employees, and the customers. As things actually operate today, though, across all business sectors, only the owners (whether private or stockholders) get any consideration. As long as nobody satisfies the customer or treats employees well, everybody can keep wringing the last dime out of the profit margin.
For myself, I fall into another category that the article references: "Verizon does tend to have excellent coverage in many areas, which makes its inferior approach to Android all the more aggravating." My wife and I switched to VZW from AT&T solely to get coverage in a rural area, which we did, and we're going to stay, since AT&T has no more intention of expanding its network than VZW does of improving its phone-adoption and OS-upgrade processes (see preceding paragraph). But it is a little aggravating.
