Is Micro FourThirds Raining on Canon’s Parade?
Correspondent, Zone-10
When David took up the challenge to fight Goliath, no one did laugh but the same people thought it was a naïve death wish. At nine feet tall, bearing full armour with a long spear and a sword, Goliath was invincible and an untenable proposition. Even arrogant, to say the least.
And so when King Saul offered his royal armour and a menu of normal weaponry, David eschewed them – the armour didn’t suit him. In fact it made him clumsy and uncomfortable and to put it mildly, he wasn’t accustomed to using conventional battle arms. You could say he was unorthodox in his thinking.
Instead David went to a nearby stream to pick up his weapon of choice – he chose pebbles from the shallow clear waters. Not one but five. And as this famous tale went, he used only one with his slingshot, took aim and with rare shrewdness for a young farmhand, and let flew the pebble. Slicing the air, the pebble slipped past Goliath’s head protection and pierced his forehead, killing him in an instant.
With the four remaining pebbles, David spent a large proportion of his lifetime to bring down four more giants and in each case, it was one too many to believe considering the enormous odds stacked against him. Each time he faced a new giant, the prospects never bode well. David was too small. Too frail. Too much of a featherweight to matter to the giant. But in every such case, it was obvious that David either forgot to read or ignored the script.
As far as good things coming in small packages are concerned, David is probably the best example to emerge from the Christian world. Stacked against seemingly insurmountable odds, the contrast between him and Goliath couldn’t be greater. Apart from the obvious size difference, one was modest and unassuming while his counterpart was brash, presumptive, rude and arrogant. One represents an unquantifiable underdog; the other, the obvious choice of a victor. One used a simple catapult and a single pebble. The other had instantly recognisable weaponry, the most sophisticated of the day. One was about guile and tactical nous but the other relied on conventionalism, brute force and maligned aggression.
Much of what David stood for (within this context), Micro FourThirds could be seen to embody. As a format, it is the youngest in the industry. Though the idea of a small camera with interchangeable lens capability isn’t new, nobody has seen anything like it in the digital world. Micro FourThirds is supported by two manufacturers (so far) and both are incomparable to the enormous size, influence and dominance posed by the traditional giants of the APS-C/full frame camera industry, notably the indisputable market leaders.
And although Panasonic is an outright sensor manufacturer for Micro FourThirds (and FourThirds), they pale by comparison to, for example, Canon or Sony. Both have phenomenal presence – Canon’s case is well documented and doesn’t need further mentioning. Sony is the largest single sensor supplier to a host of premier camera makers including Nikon whereas Panasonic supplies within the boundaries of FourThirds (and Micro FourThirds) only.
Sales-wise, Canon and Nikon take the lion’s share of the DSLR market. Panasonic is not even a distant blip and Olympus is so placed from the top two to be relatively inconsequential. Although Casio (surprised?) ranks second in Japan’s domestic sales for digital compacts, it’s still Canon and to some extent Panasonic. Olympus’ drop in rankings for digital compacts is alarming despite having some good products. When it comes to lenses on offer, premier third-party offerings from Tamron, Sigma and Tokina cater almost exclusively to all DSLR names but not quite so for FourThirds. Although this is somewhat changing gradually, the lopsidedness will still remain.
In terms of sensor size – the misguided indicator of ‘quality’ – again FourThirds cowers under the shadows of not just full frame but also APS-C. And so long as the buying public continue to believe that size is everything, it will remain an untenable situation. Couple all these to marketing presence, three names figure most visibly in most of today’s advertising – Canon, Nikon and to some extent, Sony. All three spend the most amount of money buying into the hearts of millions of users and wannabes. In that regard, even if you take FourThirds as a collective group, there are still many who remain mystified as to what Olympus or Panasonic are about. And so if numbers mean everything, companies like Canon and the rest should still feel safe.
So then how could two upstart underdogs take the battle to the giants of the industry who have long claimed it their own? Everywhere you look, it’s virtually Canon territory. Everyone and his dog own a Canon (or a Nikon). Everything you read is about Canon (or Nikon). Every which way you turn, there is a huge Canon billboard along the highway or a full-page ad in a magazine. It’s undeniable how much of a mind-altering experience just to exist in a world that is infiltrated so completely and brazenly by the big brands. You’d almost literally have to be in Pluto to escape signs of Canon intruding into your life.
FourThirds to many people continue to languish in the backwaters of everyone’s consciousness. It’s not a concept or a format that springs immediately to mind. Put it this way – for every ten shoppers at a camera store looking to purchase a DSLR kit, you’d be surprised to even find two walking out with an Olympus FourThirds setup. As for Panasonic, the proposition that someone might even be interested in their DSLR cameras is too alien to even contemplate.
This situation has been going on for more than a decade now and so the status quo has no reason to believe it will change. Given that scenario, those who continue to command the largest market shares tend to believe that it is in their right to own it. Ownership in this case is defined by outright sales numbers; numbers that reflect strength, power and dominance represented by their products but no less too by the amount of money they have spent on marketing.
None of these are unimportant – to a novice who cannot tell the difference between one brand and another, he is likely to end up purchasing a Canon DSLR on the basis that there is enough visibility everywhere to simply take over his senses and judgement. Such is the power of marketing and in that very sense, the DSLR market is all but sewn up by Canon and Nikon while everyone else fights for the crumbs.
David’s presence before Goliath for the first time might have been comical. Scriptures recorded the giant as saying, “Am I a dog that you come to fight me with a stick? I will feed your carcass to the sheep!” which is another way of saying, “who the heck are you to face me.” As Goliath towers over David, casting long consuming shadows over a small farm boy, the feeling for anyone else (other than David) would have been ominous and intimidating. A normal mortal would probably wilt under pressure well before the fight could begin.
With the status quo seated in DSLR market leadership for more than a decade, it is hard to imagine them getting unsettled even as Micro FourThirds becomes more tractable. A small itch waiting to be scratched, yes, but threatened enough to convene in the war room, no. Micro FourThirds’ increased prominence is probably too minor to even bother about but that has always been the story for underdogs but there is an element of danger in being ignorant though.
Market leaders whose rule is based on mass popularity founded on sales leadership aren’t necessarily technically advanced. Competitive pricing is as much a driving factor as blanket-cover marketing. The numbers here are almost entirely about how much of the market you can buy into. Granted that good products are still important, at the end of the day, the size of the company and how aggressive it is in claiming the market are important characteristics. And these are aspects that Canon and some other companies in the DSLR market segment possess at the exclusion of Olympus and Panasonic.
If you look at the market situation from that standpoint, it is clear that Micro FourThirds hardly mattered to the top guns in the market. It is reasonable to believe that not many estimated correctly Panasonic and Olympus’ strategy with Micro FourThirds.
