Olympus-OM
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [OM] Panasonic to Bankroll Olympus

Subject: Re: [OM] Panasonic to Bankroll Olympus
From: Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2012 09:28:12 -0500
> I'm surprised that this did not happen earlier given the somewhat close
> working relationship between the two.  I was also surprised that something
> of this sort did not take place with Kodak as the two of them teamed up to
> make the 10MB sensor some time ago.  Must be that Kodak is infiltrated with
> managers who earlier worked for Motorola.

Agreed. But one of the big problems with these companies is that
innovation from bottom-up is highly discouraged. The corporate culture
is that of conformity. Unfortunately what this means is that you do
whatever it is that your boss does and he is doing what his boss did
before him. I work for a company that is actually quite new in an old
industry. Just in the short time I've been with this company, it has
reorg'd at least twice. Every time we acquire another company the
whole structure shakes up again. The problem is continuity (and having
to reinvent the wheel each time), but the advantage is that we get a
fresh approach almost every year. Not necessarily a bad thing. (We've
been told that the entire engineering department will be reorged at
least every three years no matter what).


> I can see Panasonic gaining controlling interest of Olympus, keeping
> the name alive in the area of high-end and professional cameras and medical
> optics while Panasonic remains with the P&S products (I wanted to say toys,
> but I'll restrain myself).

The company I'd be sucking up to in a big way is Samsung. Mobilization
(Internet enabled) of photography is the future and there are only
three companies that have this mobilization thing really nailed down:
Apple, Google and Samsung. Apple is all about Apple, but Samsung will
work with anybody. Google and Apple are both all about intellectual
property. But with this "merging" with Panasonic, this very well could
be the death of Olympus in the consumer-products realm as Panasonic
and Samsung are kinda mortal enemies.

Sadly, I don't see this Panasonic buy in of Olympus to be a good
thing. I'm not saying a Fuji buy would have been any better, but as
Olympus has proven incompetent in being able to make the imaging
division profitable, it's only a matter of time before somebody shoves
a fork in this turkey..

>From Panasonic's perspective, this is a smart move. They get to
protect the intellectual propery by keeping it out of another
company's hands. At this point, Panasonic has a firm grip around the
giblets of Olympus. But until Panasonic figures out that the P&S
market is dying very fast without a mobilization product, both
Panasonic and Olympus will end up as footnotes in the history of
photography.

AG
-- 
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Sponsored by Tako
Impressum | Datenschutz