ahsanford said:
scyrene said:
ahsanford said:
Why do high end car manufacturers -- even ones with high quality standards (Mercedes, Audi, etc.) -- have race teams? :
Do you really think that is the model to follow? Flashy, maybe headline-grabbing stuff that makes no practical difference to customers' experiences?
My bad: I should have specified. I meant the much less flashy rally/road racing, where bleeding edge tech leads to high performance and winning. I'm not a big racing aficionado, but a friend is, and I would hear stories to no end how Audi was mopping the floor with folks with some turbodiesel fancypants design. That built a reputation around the brand of what
the rest of company's offerings could do.
One could argue Canon's best glass is serving that exact same sort of role for the EF portfolio at large: showy, super expensive, but
man, it delivers. Not every Canon lens is a value/reliability-obsessed Honda -- some are supercars with spectacular engineering.
Fair enough, thanks for clarifying. I don't think the analogy holds though.
ahsanford said:
scyrene said:
LOL! You do remember they're a commercial enterprise? Everything they do is commercial, whether you interpret it that way or not. Nobody is making you buy this lens. How is it a problem that a minor upgrade gets a new model number (which seems to be the nub of the criticism)? The lineup is not worse than it was a week ago, in some small ways it may be better. I genuinely don't understand your problem with this.
My beef is that they are hooking up the cash wagon to a lens that serves an additional role to the business than just earning cash. Some elements of EF tent up the reputation of the system -- this is absolutely one of them.
Help me understand how this offering increases folks' esteem or perceived value of the brand. I don't believe it does (unless colors matching is a must for you). It's an overtly/strictly commercial move to me because
all it's going to do is make money -- not improve the system, unlock new functionality, improve the reputation of the brand, etc.
I like the fact that Canon has a few very special lenses no one else can match. Slapping white paint on one of those special lenses and having the audacity to call it new and improved tarnishes the brand, IMHO. That's all.
Well first of all, you're being a little unfair to say it's just 'slapping white paint on'. It sounds like a fairly modest change*, for sure, but how is it worse than not refreshing the thing at all? If these changes were made but the numbering wasn't changed (and I think I've heard that some long-standing products do have minor updates over the years, 'under the hood' so to speak), you'd be fine with it, right? So it *is* about the naming, essentially. Second, I still don't see why making money is to be condemned in this context - they aren't doing anything malign, nobody is being stiffed. As for reputation, or 'perceived value', I doubt the vast majority will notice or care. It pisses you off, that's absolutely fine. But let's not dress this up as anything approaching objective criticism. It seems they touched a nerve for some reason.
*I recall one or two Canon releases of the last couple of years being praised on the Lens Rentals blog (when they tore them down) for the updates to internal construction and design - stuff that will almost certainly not affect us normal users, but is still considered and positive. These things aren't ever mentioned in marketing materials or on spec sheets though.
