I am business clueless too. And your reminder about the niche market
is well taken. I think it is the bloodbath we have seen in digicams
and the recent loss of Konica, Minolta, and Contax as well as the
entry of Sony who is usually a strong player in the marketplace that
is worrisome. Plus the experience of being abandoned by Oly seems to
underline the idea that they themselves no longer want to be that
much of a niche player and it is a big sign that they are not
philanthropic and expect to make a decent profit at it. Market growth
is slowing and all predictions I have seen are that the DSLR market
with be saturated in 2008. For Oly to be profitable allowing the
production of new cameras and lenses they not only will have to be
competitive at least in some ways, but will have to take some market
share from the big guys. They know how to compete. You just saw Canon
do a self cleaning sensor. One less reason to buy an Oly over a Canon
especially as that feature filters into the rest of the line.
Winsor
Long Beach, California, USA
On Mar 10, 2007, at 6:48 PM, Joel Wilcox wrote:
> I admit one other thing. I've never quite got it when it comes to
> complaints about Olympus' business decisions, marketing, and so forth.
> I'm not personally terribly impatient with Olympus. It seems like
> they're marching to a different drummer, not really worried about
> competition, keeping active in their niche. They seem to have
> contributed some good ideas to the general requirement set of DSLRs
> and have continued their legacy of fine optics. If they didn't throw
> an immense amount of effort into high-speed AF, they weren't going to
> get these users from C and N anyway. Given the title of this thread, I
> hate to mention that I can remember when people assumed that Apple's
> market share spelled the end of the company. Not a bit. But it has
> seemed at times that the assumption folks who complain about Olympus
> are making is that Olympus needs to compete head on with C and N and
> beat them at their particular game. I just wonder why they should do
> that if they can find some success doing something different. The
> latter certainly seems more fun. But I am clueless in business, as
> I've doubtless just shown!
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|