>Sadly, I agree. Oly's main weakness in my opinion has been their
>ability to bring new product to market. It was true of the OMs and
>why they faltered. It is why they brought a 5MP professional DSLR to
>market 2 years too late and compelled them to drop their price to
>compete against entry DSLRs with more resolution, drastically
>destroying the profit margin they had planned for the E-1. The
>increase in DSLR sales this year is predicted to be much smaller than
>last and next year even less. Oly had a chance if they had brought a
>competitive E-1 replacement and a finished lens line to market early
>this year, but now I wonder about its future.
What remains very strange, however, is that the whole E-system was
presented as a well thought out multi-stage project. When the OM-2
was launched, it was very obvious that it's design must have been
well under way even before the moment the OM-1 was presented at
Photokina. It is difficult to imagine that a successor to the E-1
hasn't been in development during the last two years. The whole
series of pro-lenses seems a futile effort without a pro-level body.
>Is this the way free market capitalism works now? Fewer and fewer
>choices? The last behemoth eating its last competitor and then
>deciding that product is not profitable enough so nobody has a
>camera? Seems like it used to work the other way round. What changed?
Capitalism has tended to offer more pseudo-choices, but alas very
often those nobody was waiting for.
Ton
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