jwil
Offline
• •
Upload & Sell: Off
|
 p.50 #16 · 'Unofficial' Photokina RUMOR Thread | |
Guy Mancuso wrote:
Like I said many posts back just revolutionary stuff and nothing evolutionary and comments like 'jwil' just said proofs my point. Not picking on you 'jwil' but what i am saying is what is the point , consumers are not stupid and will look elsewhere when they see camera's coming out with obvious upgrades that really do nothing except try to earn money for Canon. Let' s face it the 1dMKII to the 1dMKIIn what was the selling point a larger LCD and the upgrades could have easily been in a firware upgrade . i may be mssing something but my point is more money for not a heck of a lot gain. This cheapens the product line in peoples minds and will catch up to them. Folks will just start passing on new offerings and wait for version 2 or 3 down the road. personally i think this is bad business and that is just my opinion about it. Folks know there camera is outdated the day they buy it because in a year or less something else is out and will depricate to nothing. Canon makes great product and is a marketing genius but there product management stinks. not sure if there stubborn mules or what but they have big holes they are not addressing and these are some of the reasons that guys like me have left. maybe they don't care the consumer is the ulmiighty dollar i know that but there are hobbyist and many of them that will drop mega dollars on gear more than i would, do they really want to lose these folks.
okay carry on...Show more →
First and foremost, Canon is a corporation out to make money and meet the demands of a board of directors and the shareholders. NEVER forget that about any major corporation. A company cares about the consumer only as far as it takes to part them from their money. Period.
People talk about customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the needs of the market, but understanding what drives consumer behavior is a self serving for a company, not philanthropy. It's about ensuring there is a widget that a consumer will pay top dollar for in whatever market a company is after. It's not about giving the consumer the worlds greatest product and taking a financial bath on it because it somehow moved the industry forward.
So, when you say Canon appears to be churning out products with marginal feature benefit for the sake of selling more product, I'd suggest that's exactly what they have in mind. Same as Nikon, and Sony, and Olympus, et. al.
Consumers are not typically driven by a mindset of "this company just wants my money so I'm going to boycott them", the normal drivers are aquisition cost, feature set, reliability, past experience (loyalty to brand) and reputation. Typically in about that order, and this is all well documented by companies like JD Power, Gallup, Harris etc.
Now the interesting thing is that as you move up the range in Canon's camera line there is a pretty major change in mindset. The lowend is dominated by consumer sheep that think more megapixels is the end-all be-all of quality, and the higher end is dominated by advanced consumers and pros that realize a gimmick is a gimmick and there's no need to dump a 1DM2 for a 1DM2n just to get a larger LCD. The drivers at the high end are more about total cost of ownership, output quality, duty cycle and MTBF/lifetime reliability.
For the upmarket, you are correct in that a new new camera needs to be a significant improvement over the outgoing model. I think Canon messed up with the 1DM2n and didn't provide a compelling reason to upgrade. My theory is that sales of the new 1DM2n would have probably been quite disappointing if the old 1DM2 had hung around in the channel at a lower price than the 1DM2n.
For the upmarket a very significant upgrade needs to be offered, further cementing my belief that a new 1D or 1Ds replacement will not appear at Photokina. The current Marks are VERY hard acts to follow. However for the mass market, Canon needs to be spec competetive with not only the competition but their own new low end. Again, the segment that the 30D lies in is still very consumer oriented in the mass market and only a 2fps advantage over a D80 at a cost of $300 will not be enough to satisfy consumers.
(both cameras have 3200ISO and 'usable' is subjective in it's value toward the price difference)
Long story short, I'd love to see Canon introduce some astonishingly good products that are targeted toward a discriminating users needs, but that simply isn't their focus as a corporation. Canon has a cash cow in it's camera line and it'll milk it for all it's worth, bank on that.
Edited by Jeff on Aug 28, 2006 at 09:56 PM GMT (Reason: quote tags for clarity)
|
