Hasselblad victory?

[michael]

Steve,

A very good analogy with IBM. The arrogance of market leadership.

I would have bought the hassy 28mm in a heartbeat. But since this would have forced me to obsolete my considerable inveestment in my current back, instead I've decided to buy a 28mm and another camera which will work with my Phase One P45.

Maybe Hasselblad's approach will be good for the rest of the medium format industry after all if it pushes people to buy competative products.

Michael

[MarkKay]

The difference is that canon does not change their lens mounts with every or even every other camera (sensor) upgrade.  

Hasselblad's new product offering is a brave new approach to making and selling cameras.. They have taken their MF cameras and pushed them as far into the digital realm as possible.  The new "Full Frame" sensor will become the de-facto standard of the future, as far as MF sensors are concerned, and much like reduced-frame lenses for the DSLR's of the 35mm mold, future Hassy lenses will be made with this new standard in mind. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a re-play of the Canon EF lens scenario, where Canon in the mid 80's completely reinvented it's whole camera and lens system.  It worked for them (after much gnashing of teeth), so it is possible that it may work for a venerable brand like Hassy..

As for it's closed nature, being open is fine for a standard, but not fine for the companies making that standard.  Look at IBM today, the creator of the personal computer.  A company called Dell is now top dog in that market.  Hassy obviously wants to avoid the pitfall of other companies out there.

The success of their strategy hinges on three aspects -

Firstly their product offering must be top-notch in order to get existing Hassy users to dump their present (expensive) systems for this new one.

Secondly they need to avoid the sort of backlash that Nikon got caught in when they tried to encrypt part of their raw files

Thirdly, the availability of credible alternatives.  Today there are none, but the smoldering remnants of Mamiya, Contax and Pentax MF may yet be revived (like Minolta) with a shining knight coming to the rescue and injecting cash and technology.

My view is that consumers want choice, and having a single dominant solution provider is bad for consumers choice, and bad for the market.   Market bully's are not sufficiently motivated to offer innovation, and do so only when competition hots up.  Case in point is Canon's 400D which incorporates "new" technology that other makers have had for a while.. Why? Because those other manufacturers are coming up with viable alternatives to the Canon model (Sony, Pentax, Nikon etc), and Canon, previously complacent within it's own model, had to react.  Competition is good!

So ultimately I hope Hassy fails(in it's closed system), if only to allow for more choice and the possibility of interoperability of camera bits.  I still enjoy using my manual lenses from yesteryear on my 5D Canon.. I would like to hope that we can do that and more with future systems.

So Viktor, please come back and give some direction to your lot!
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