No one in the camera industry had any idea that digital would come on so fast. Old, stodgy tradition-bound camera makers who normally kept a model on the shelf for a decade or beyond suddenly found themselves building cameras they did not understand with a shelf-life cycle of one to two years. For a company that has been doing business in a specific way for half-a-century, the pain of learning a whole new way to do business has got to be horrible. At least consumer electronics companies like Sony and Panasonic are accustomed to short shelf-cycles, though I have heard that even Sony has been doing lay-offs.
The problem does not lie with the CEO or board of directors - but rather with lower and middle management. The high-honcho can get the whole bunch into a meeting room and exhort them to redouble their efforts. In the minds of some, they will say "this really does not apply to me", or "I will be retiring in a couple of years, so can probably hold out", and so it will be business as usual as the company goes down the tubes. Inertia is collective - if most of the members of lower management give 85% instead of 110%, the company runs out of steam.
Ilford was in bankruptcy, Polariod was in bankruptcy and broken up, Agfa is pretty much out of the camera and film business, Contax and Yashica terminated, and most recently Konica-Minolta. Kodak is struggling, in spite of getting into digital imaging almost at the beginning - middle management again. Leitz has been in trouble for years. With Kyocera killing Contax, Zeiss has had to scramble for new markets.
It has been a marketplace driven by first-time buyers, and now the supply is now running thin. In the early 1990s, anyone building PCs could expect double digit growth. Then one day, everyone who wanted one, had one. The market had saturated and companies dropped like flies. We have come from dozens of PC brands to a handful. The market now is mostly replacement machines. The digital camera business is also approaching that point rapidly.
If it was a rocky road for the past few years trying to transform from an old-time, slow-moving, film-based camera business to what is essentially a cut-throat digital consumer electronics business, and to keep up with demand, how many old companies will have over-extended themselves and be unable to cope with retrenching once the market is satisfied?
Of course, assuming that there is no collapse of the capital market like PC industry faced after the dot-com fiasco, there will be a steady stream of much improved models long into the future. At least this will assure a market for replacement cameras. None the less, a lot of classic brand names are likely to fade.
I would rather be a camera user than a camera maker at this point.
larry!
http://www.larry-bolch.com/ ICQ 76620504
