Mike,
I don't remember whom you are responding to. Maybe you are simply discussing with
another U.S. member of the list.
However, this is an international list, and (although you may have a point in regards
to the importance of the U.S. market) if we include the world market in the "us",
surely we represent an important market for any company with an international, not to
say global, distribution. The Pentax trademark is globally still a very strong one.
It's there among the big four and it is known all over the world.
This list is a very conveniant, efficiant and cheap way for them to get continuous
feedback from a crossection of customers who are of some importance in keeping their
trademark alive. (And however comparatively big or small the SLR-division is, this is
the segment we're talking about isn't it?)
They would be fools not to monitor or listen to our views on their products. I don't
think they are fools, so yes I am pretty confident that they do pay attention to what
we list members, the market, think about their products.
As for the reasons why they didn't want to house the list anymore, I don't know, but
it would make perfect sense to me if a company eventually didn't want to officially be
too closely connected to, or have some of the hassels that derive from some of the
utterly disrespectful kind of postings that periodically went on on this list.
Lasse
Mike J. wrote
> >I have another theory. Maybe Pentax was trying to collect our opinions over
> >the last few years in order to finalize their MZ-S (the name is not
> >important) features. Now they have collected enough information (they think)
> >and the MZ-S is about ready. In order to cut down the cost, they have
> >decided to drop the list and let someone else to run it. That means from now
> >on, what we said was less important that we used to be. Just a guess.
>
> Here's another think, more based in the reality of the camera industry:
>
> Once upon a time, the American market was the be-all and end-all of the
> Japanese camera companies, and everything we wanted, they fell over
> themselves to make. Now, the American market is relatively less important
> than the world market and the home (Japanese) market, and it's relatively
> unaffected by corporate responsiveness anyway, PLUS the SLR market has
> become only a tiny fraction of the parent company's camera profit picture.
> Upshot? They just don't listen to us, period. They don't need to. Japanese
> companies haven't been heeling to the beck and call of the American consumer
> for some time now. Our day is done.
>
> In fact, from inside the industry, what you often hear is that the Japanese
> home offices of the camera companies don't even listen very well to the
> American distributorships--and often don't tell them very much about what's
> going on. Chance are, Pentax USA isn't very well informed about what Pentax
> Japan is doing, Pentax Japan doesn't much give a fig what Pentax USA thinks,
> and "our" opinion isn't worth a hill of beans to either one of them.
>
> I don't think it matters much whether Pentax USA is, or is not, "listening"
> to our alleged collective wisdom. Difficult though it may be for us to adapt
> to this fact, this is not the 1960s, and we simply aren't important any more
> to a Japanese company's financial health.
>
> Here's a vivid example of what I mean: a couple of years ago, I got a Kodak
> company insider to admit to me that, for a 5-year period, Kodak had
> essentially "forgotten" about what it calls the "AdAm" market--advanced
> amateurs. It was marketing to far larger and more important markets, such as
> grandmothers and "tween" girls, but it had become largely inconsequential to
> them that photography enthusiasts also buy photographic materials. We're
> such a tiny group relatively speaking that we just don't matter much to the
> company. (Incidentally, when it "remembered" about us, Kodak responded by
> starting to market a slick, expensive captive newsletter called "ViewFinder"
> as an "alternative" to advertising in enthusiast magazines. Big whoop.)
>
> Japan stopped making cameras primarily for the American market some time
> ago. What its home market thinks of new products is now far more important
> to any Japanese company than what we think. We should wake up and get used
> to that fact. Our opinion really doesn't matter one way or the other. It's
> hubristic and somewhat ludicrous--not to mention outdated--for us to believe
> that it does.
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