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Re: [OM] The 1983 America's Cup yacht race and the camera market today

Subject: Re: [OM] The 1983 America's Cup yacht race and the camera market today
From: Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2012 09:40:27 -0600
> I'm not sure that you are right with either business or sailing
competition, Ken.  Yes you have to mark your competitors in each, but
sometimes you have to take a risk and go the other way.

Of course, the tacticians and skippers will try different tricks and
strategies to gain whatever inches they can when in close-quarters racing,
but as a defender, the only time you would break away from the challenger
is when you know that you have already lost. Same as in Football (Soccer).
Never leave the challenger unchallenged.

The premise of this statement though is challenger vs. defender. Not
challenger vs. challenger. In a challenger vs. defender race, the defender
is already the established winner. Here is another parallel: Every kid on
Earth has at one time or another played "king of the mountain". As the
defender, you job is to hold the hill. You never leave the top of the hill.
Most importantly, you turn and face the challenger. What Canon is doing is
not turning and facing the challenger, but appears to be sitting on the top
of the hill like some guru who's robe got frozen to the ice cap.

Yes, sometimes you have to take a risk and go the other way, but only when
you've already lost the dominant position. Kodak stayed the course with
film too long and let the challengers (Primarily Canon and Sony) redefine
the market and dominate. Instead of covering them move for move, well, we
know the rest of the story. Within the digital world, we had CCD and CMOS.
CCD was superior (and could still be superior), but the challenger (Canon)
came out with a decent CMOS product and the customers identified (either
correctly or incorrectly) that the advantage was due to the change in
lettering. Companies that stuck to their CCD guns lost. Those that quickly
adapted did well.


> I'm not saying that you are necessarily wrong about Canon, but you're not
necessarily right either :-)

I was trying to be very careful in not being too committal either way in
this article. I draw a parallel. In the case of the 1983 America's Cup
race, Dennis Conner chose incorrectly. Had the winds actually been better
where he went, he would have been the hero, not the zero. As the defender,
he needed to minimize all risks. Instead, he took the risk of leaving the
challenger alone. He may have lost either way, but we'll never know because
he chose to break away and leave the challenger unchallenged. Had he
stayed  with the challenger, he may have been able to force an error.

I'm not saying that Canon will lose. I wouldn't be that presumptuous.
However, what I am saying is that past failures of corporations very
typically follow this model. Companies like Facebook succeed because
MySpace fail to identify the worthy challengers and shadow them move for
move not letting them get too far out on their own. Blackberrys continue to
lose market share because they didn't immediately head Apple off at the
pass with an equivalent touch-screen product.


> I've decided against buying the Panny GX1, having handled the camera in a
shop in Cambridge.  I still don't like EVFs, having used both the Oly and
the Panny versions and a system camera needs a eye-level finder.  So I
might buy the G1X as my portable-but-larger-sensor camera . . .

I really like EVFs when done right. The auto gain functionality tends to
be a litte disconcerting at first, but it isn't long before you get used to
the advantages. One big mistake most everybody has made, though, is
overlaying so much information on the screen that you can't see what it is
you are photographing. Sony, for example, is completely out of control in
this aspect.

AG
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