The revealing of the 6D has got to be one of the biggest anticlimaxes in Canon's recent DSLR history. Never has a camera wasted so much potential to score well. If Canon were alone and the only manufacturer producing a cheaper DSLR then it would probably be doing better amongst the Internet forums but unfortunately for Canon, there is the Nikon D600, alongside which the 6D appears as a "huh?"
The 5D Mark III also suffered a lot, primarily because of the rise in price without a commensurate rise in IQ. Again, if you took away the Nikon D800, it doesn't appear too bad but again, there is nothing exciting about it.
Now that all of Canon's cards are on the table for this year, you're left wondering what were they thinking? That Nikon and Sony would just stand by and not enter the market? Or did Canon simply underestimate what they've been able to do in CMOS sensor development?
The 1DX is out there by itself. It is a remarkable piece of equipment, tailor made for its target audience. And perhaps that's where Canon's problem is: it doesn't really know who the audience is for the 5D3 and 6D. Why wouldn't it know that? Because so many people bought the 5D Mark II, it became impossible for Canon to understand all the details of who was using it, how and why.
Thus the success of the 5D Mark II may have actually killed Canon in multiple ways. First they've become complacent because they've thought they could just tweak it a little here and a little there, increase the price and everyone would fall over themselves in love. That hasn't happened, in part because of the price and in part because it was just tweaking. In the second, as above, the camera has had such wide appeal that it became impossible for them to fully grasp why it succeeded and thus they didn't know how to repeat that success. This is likely just an accident of history as much as anything else. Thirdly, in not knowing who to listen to or why the 5D Mark II was such a success, they've ended up listening to the wrong folks about what camera Canon would need to succeed.
Thus given what the 5D3 and 6D have revealed to be, I think that the only option for Canon is remove the people who made the final decisions about which features should be in/out and the price for the camera. I think it is more than evident that they targets for both cameras simply wasn't high enough and thus Canon has underperformed.
