Your company buys out the competition all the time. I can point to several really good products they have ruined. (I bet you can too)
Guys like us in the business world are used to dealing with customers, and their occasional vitriol. Game developers really are sheltered from it, unless they take it upon themselves to venture forth onto the forums, and then when they do it's a rude awakening.
When you start your career and are exposed to it pretty much from year 1, you slowly learn to ignore the anger and focus on the problem. You also learn to turn a deaf ear to most things. Though I will say that I rarely had to deal with any personal attacks myself. Usually if a customer were interacting with me, they were utterly grateful to have such a high connection.
Ian said via twitter that he didn't realize what he signed up for when he started interacting with the community. He had no idea he'd get the backlash for the NFL Exclusive Deal angst. At the same time, he didn't have experience handling customer criticism/anger (Ian even said he had me blocked, but while I criticized harshly at times, I can't find anywhere where I personally attacked in my posts, so the skin was thin to start), and to make things worse, many community members didn't appreciate the direct communication they had with an EA representative (something that is very hard to come by).
I personally enjoy the communication, and the insights we get into the development process and the state of the game. As a fan of 2K Sports, I can tell you it's far more than 2K Sports has ever deigned to provide to the community, especially in the football arena. 3 years after the release of APF2K8 and they still haven't given us information on exactly how the Player Abilities work, no patch to fix some of the easily fixable problems, and they even took down the league websites after telling us they would be back when they went down initially (the loss of which effectively killed the online community). As much as a dislike EA for screwing gamers over the NFL Exclusive licensing deal (yes, I know it's not EA's fault, but we'll agree to disagree on that topic for now), 2K Sports has shown themselves to be utterly indifferent to their fans as well, even on things that don't take much time/$$$ such as answering basic questions about their game. EA Sports have won points in the community / interaction arena for their football fans in my humble view, while 2K Sports seems to have gone out of their way to shun their football community.