Kepano Kekuewa

The Innovator's Dilemma is a fantastic book - and we can see the rise and fall of great companies, as described by the book, repeating itself here.  Incumbents fall into the trap of focusing too much on their current customers' needs while failing to recognize and address the upstart.     In each case, the upstart is inferior by every measurable standard.  Yet, the nascent technology improves under the incumbents' noses while the incumbents focus on meeting the needs of their existing customers.  The incumbents are rarely unaware of the developing competitive technology, but they need to meet sales targets and make payroll. If publicly traded, there's even more acute pressure to satisfy the existing customer base - on a quarterly basis.   To the demise of so many companies, the nascent technology eventually becomes good enough, and the incumbent is caught flat-footed, unable to shift to the new paradigm.     It's extremely hard for any one company to address multiple markets.  I recall sitting in a town-hall style meeting with Steve Jobs, when one of my colleagues asked about Apple's enterprise efforts.  Having just left Oracle, I, too was curious about my new employer's enterprise positioning, after all, we had Xserves and RAID equipment to sell.  The defining moment for me was Steve's response, and I'm paraphrasing here - Apple is a consumer electronics company, not an enterprise company.  We cannot serve both masters.  Others have tried and failed.  Our goal is to make the best consumer electronics products possible.  If you want to sell enterprise, just walk down the street - HP, IBM, Sun.... they're all just down the street, and they're hiring.   And like that, the veil of confusion was lifted.  Having cut my technology teeth at Sun and Oracle, I was befuddled by so many "Appleisms" I encountered up to that point.  It's not that they didn't care about enterprise users - Apple just wasn't going to prioritize product specs or operations to the needs of corporate IT customers.  Where I used to present product roadmaps in previous jobs, as an Apple employee, I would learn about products at the same time as my customers.   So, why the Apple history?  I believe this is where most camera companies are challenged - i.e. which master do they serve?  Most companies are structured along divisional lines.  Each divisional VP is responsible for his/her own P&L.  The broadcast division is going to see the consumer division as competition and artificial limitations are often employed to keep products in their lanes.     There are few camera companies that closely align with Apple's functional approach.  BM probably more than any other because they don't have a legacy camera business to protect.  Fuji seems to have a similar ethos, focusing on a particular type of photographer.  Fuji and BMC are not trying to be all things to all customers, and like Apple, they also face product constraints, if at different scales.     If history has a way of repeating itself, I think Canon/Nikon/Sony/Panasonic have a lot to worry about.  While Canon and NIkon duke it out over NFL sideline status and Sony and Panasonic fight over the TV studios, millions of people just got 120 FPS cameras with built-in editing and the ability to upload to YouTube directly.     Having spent the last couple of weeks hammering Apple's Motion 5 really hard (so addicted to flying cameras through 3D space and key framing rack focus!!!), I can't help but imagine the iPhone running something like Motion on iOS some day.   Software has a funny way of bending the laws of physics - that, I believe, is the space to watch for us image makers.  Cinematography is no longer a niche.  Even if our elevated sense of quality won't accept something like the iPhone as a story telling tool, for millions of people, it's good enough.  And, that, is what Canon/Nikon/Sony/Panasonic should be worrying about.