I briefly mentioned the photographic industry a while ago and this article in Smarthouse (may need to register to read it) prompted more thinking. Basically the 35mm SLR camera business has been dominated by Canon, Nikon, Pentax and Olympus (apologies to the rest of the market) for so long that was hard to imagine any major change happening anytime soon. Of course then the charge coupled device (CCD) came along and we went digital at the point and shoot end quicker than you can click a shutter. Seemed that quick anyway. That hurt film companies, big processors, minilabs and lower end camera sellers like Kodak. In a race to move fast Kodak probably missed the inital boat and has taken a while to catch up. Hard to know why they waited so long with the memory of Polaroid still pretty fresh in their minds.
Anyway, it's another classic case of disruptive forces at play.
The hardware and film makers got the shakes about 5 years ago because new, alternative (digital) technology finally came of age. Enough people had computers with big enough hard drives, fast burning optical media and hi-res printers to make digital seem doable. You could argue that film is superior until you are blue in the face - and they did - but it's no longer that much better, certainly not at the low to medium end. And home printing is faster, more selective and more convenient than even waiting an hour to find your happy snaps are blurred.
So the camera guys get shaken up by the computer and consumer electronics guys. New technology proliferates, new brands emerge and a brand new price war erupts. It also drives sales of computers and hi-res colour printers. Film is dying.
Now some crossover was already happening with Canon leveraging their optical competence in the scanner market and diversifying into printers. And the big SLR makers could only hold out so long before swapping their most popular film-based SLRs for digitals at similar but higher price points.
They love selling SLRs because each one can be accessorised. And they had managed to avoid any dominant standard of lens mount, so if you bought a Pentax or a Nikon you were pretty much obliged to buy Pentax or Nikon lenses, apart from a few aternatives with adapters. It manufactures loyalty. Once a Pentax buyer, always a Pentax buyer - if only because it's too expensive to swap over a whole fleet of flash lenses. So it's a pretty attractive market from a profit perspective.
Enter the disruptors. It's been brewing for 10 years or more. More and more electronics had stretched the old mechanical linkages between lenses and camera bodies already, so the buyer was getting more reasons - or opportunities - to swap brands. If I had to buy a whole fleet of new lenses anyway, because the mechanical links to aperture control were now electronic or because autofocus required a new mount anyway, well I may as well look around. I always fancied a Nikon... ;-)
So digital is the latest and probably greatest incentive to switch brands. The race is on to once again lock customers into proprietary camera to body designs. Camera makers without the resources to go digital will have to consider their alternatives. Pursue the high-end highest-resolution traditionalists and pros who won't, or can't yet, drop film, or get out. Konica-Minolta did both. They hived off their 35mm SLR business to Sony and concentrated their resources on the medium-format higher resolution film-based business.
Sony brings a big brand into the SLR market. A brand that bridges successfully from the consumer electronics end of the spectrum to top-shelf pro video gear. If they are serious about it then they should take a big slice of the market and put the heat on the rest.
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