jwil
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 p.54 #20 · 'Unofficial' Photokina RUMOR Thread | |
kleinssz69 wrote:
It seems as if some guys/gals think that canon releases camera / lenses in response to whatever the competetors are releasing. Think about it, how long does it take for a company to put a new product into production?
I just chuckle when I read some of the post. Don' you think that work on the 400D and whatever else canon will release has begun at a minumum, a year ago? How can the 400D then be a response to what nikon or sony released a month ago? No doubt, canon has already begun work on Digic 4 even though digic 3 isn't in our hands yet.
I've been deeply involved in design and production (mind you, not in tech products), and the ideas and minds behind the products we were working on were years ahead of what the consumer asks for or suspected.
If a company like canon wouldn't be a few steps (years even) ahead of the consumers, they would have long been surpassed by the competition....Show more →
Manufacturers very often release product in response to the competition, the but the trick is that it has been in development for a quite some time. The average person has never been exposed to how future product marketing and planning work in a large company, so this doesn't seem that logical.
Most large companies divide marketing and planning functions among several strategic groups, including Future Product Planning which is tied to R&D, Market Research tied to consumer trend research (think major market shifts like the popularity evolution of the SUV), Competetive Intelligence (industrial espionage), and Current Product Marketing which is closely tied to sales.
The basic function of these groups is that CI and MR feed trends and competetive intel (often down to the competitions specific product roadmaps out to 3-5 years) to R&D and Future PM. That starts the product development cycle usually about the time a product in that space is launched.
So, for example: Canon just launched the Rebel XTi, so right about now, Canon competetive intelligence is putting together a strategy to get next to Nikon, Sony and probably Olympus and Pentax people at Photokina to drill for reaction to the camera. This happens off the show floor. I'm not talking about pumping some booth bunny for info that's 8 levels above her pay grade.
Then over the next 4-6 months CI and MR will be researching the moves of competetors. Does Sony throw $250M into CCD development, does Nikon get out of the microscope business, etc. Add to that some back channel chatter among people in the industry and a Canon will be able to develop a pretty clear picture of where the competition is going to move over time. They anticipate those moves, wargame out a bunch of product scenarios and calculate a business case for each, then set their own strategic direction to meet the competitions likely threats.
Over the development cycle, CI continues to work on specific product roadmaps, if they don't already have them, and that gets fed to Development to refine the next gen product, which is already in the works.
Within about 4 months from now, The successor of the Rebel XTI will be deep into development in anticipation of what Nikon's D50 replacement will look like. This is why manufacturers always seem to leapfrog each other.
So, the XTi is a response to the D50, and probably a partial response to the D80, but Canon knew about both long before those products were even out of development. I've mentioned before that I work in strategic planning for a printing company that competes against Canon. In our CI group, we have the next 3+ years of product development roadmaps for Canon and other competition. It may change slightly over time but we know about where they will be - technically - in 3 years. The products we have in development now are to meet a threat that doesn't yet exist, but it will.
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