Mikehit said:romanr74 said:I don't think that the total sales number is meaningful enough to understand how well the different companies do with their business decisions with the different stakeholders out there. Meaningful data would include product groups, performance level, form factor, sales channel, consumer groups, promotion, product life cycle, margins etc.
Product groups - I believe Canon leads sales in DSLR and mirrorless. How narrowly do you want so split that? Sony would win the FF mirrorless only because they are about the only company making them. If they are a minority in the APS-C mirrorless the only conclusion you can draw is that people prefer to buy DSLR APS-C
performance level - this is ambiguous. What use is a high-performance product if people don't like the size/shape/colour/after sales service...etc What is the use of making the world's best medicine if people hate the taste?
Form factor - what has that got to do with it? What use is the best designed camera if it only has a crap sensor?
Life cycle: is Sony's rapid life cycle better than Canon's slow one? They sure have hacked off many a user who feels cheated by being made to buy a sub-standard product 12 months later
Sales is a measure of all those aspects as a whole package. The backers of Betamax where whining the same thing 30 years ago and ended up losing to a technically inferior product. Oh look...Sony made Betamax as well....
The problem is sales is an indicator if you got it right after the event. Taking short-term sales figures as 'proof' can be as dangerous as relying on them to justify complacency. One thing with Sony is you can say 'they have got exciting products' but what you cannot do is look at Sony and say 'they know how to do it in the long term'.
On the other hand, you can say is 'Canon know how to do it in the long term' and that they are developing mirrorless at a slower pace - and they have closed the gap significantly in the last 2 years. The key question is 'when mirrorless really takes a big share of the DSLR-style market in 3-4 years (?) will they have advanced enough to keep their pre-eminence'.
people like douglaurent seem to be saying 'No'. others are more relaxed about it
I'm not arguing if Canon is doing right or wrong. I'm saying that if you want to assess if individual spec decisions are right or wrong, you have to look at how any given product sells in various channels and to various customer groups (e.g. sports, studio/fashion, film-makers, hobbyist, etc.). You also want to see how a given individual product's sale ramps up and how fast it flattens after the market introduction (life cycle). You want to understand how early you have to run promotions and to what extent. You look at product segments (performance levels, form factors, product groups) and market segments (sales channels, consumer groups) to fine-tune your strategy and decisions. This gives you meaningful and timely data - certainly much more meaningful than a total sales number.
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