And you think it would be easier to get a return on development costs by dragging it out 15 years? Who has a roadmap that long? Think about how many companies have dropped out of the storage market in the last 15 years.
A lot of this is going to be down to gradual refinements of the process over time. Sure, it might be possible for them to move quicker, but again, the total development costs would likely be higher, at least in the short term, and tape storage is ultimately all about providing storage at the lowest possible cost. As long as they manage to keep up with, or stay slightly ahead of the competition, they don't have much incentive to rapidly push development forward. Companies are going to buy their product either way. And if they did rush development, only to find that some alternate technology made what they developed obsolete, they wouldn't have the option of shifting their course of development down the line to something that would be more practical, potentially resulting in money wasted on developing something they won't be using.