>
> I disagree. Software, sure; many great examples of folks with an idea,
> coding skills and total commitment making it big.
>
The reason why I say this is because, frankly, digital photography has
become a mature technology. At this point there is no need to "invent" from
the ground up. There are fab houses to take care of any chip manufacturing,
factories in China to build ANYTHING. Most importantly, there are
engineering firms everywhere that will design the hardware and circuit-board
layouts.
As to the firmware in the cameras, even that doesn't need to be a ground-up
thing anymore. Do you honestly think that "face detection" was
simultaneously invented by 12 different camera companies? Hardly. It, and
a myriad of other features are all modular, licenses firmware code.
In the compact camera world, there are only two or three factories building
nearly all of the compact cameras for almost all camera companies. For
Christmas I bought my daughters a couple pocket-sized cameras. One is a
Nikon the other is a Samsung. There are obvious differences in the
"branding" aspect, but they both were built in the same factory using the
same components. While researching, I discovered the same commonalities and
sub-structures in multiple camera brands--even the lenses were the same.
What Sigma could have done is outsourced the firmware production to any
company that does the firmware for most any pocket camera. It was as though
Sigma was trying to build this thing entirely from scratch and they just
don't have the brains for that.
Where I will agree with Moose and Chuck on this is when a company is
engineering a greenfield technology. You can outsource the manufacturing,
but you can't as easily outsource the inventing. I worked for a few years
for an electronics company that did soup-to-nuts greenfield engineering to
manufacturing to sales/support. It took no less than five years to bring a
product from concept to market and if it was truly greenfield, it was closer
to 10 years.
AG
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