Leica is a perfect example because Adobe makes less money of an S2 or an M9 than Leica, so having Adobe do their software makes sense and lets them concentrate on hardware.
But now take a Canon Rebel, which costs $500 or something, and then the enthusiast user is supposed to go out and get Lightroom ($200) and Photoshop ($200) which cost Adobe zilch marginal cost to sell over the net. In the end the user has spent maybe $1200 in camera gear lenses and software, and Adobe has made $400 of profit. Well, it doesn't make sense from Canon's point of view - Canon is making the camera, Adobe is making several times the profit of Canon's sale of that camera.
So in a sense, with our high-end cameras Adobe is selling camera accessories, but for consumer enthusiast models the camera is now economically an accessory input device to the main profit maker which is Adobe.
And let's face it, I don't think Adobe is going to be very happy with any camera company who differentiate themselves enough to threaten the fungibility of input devices
Which is why I believe that we will only see real consumer-level innovation from companies who find some trick to keep the value now going to Adobe for themselves. You can do a lot of innovation if you have $250 of R&D budget available for a $1000 product.
Edmund
PS This scenario played out in the PC world, with IBM, Compaq (remember them?), HP, Dell and many many others making PCs and Microsoft making the profit. Every attempt by the PC makers to differentiate and innovate got nixed. In the end the only company which could innovate was Apple, because it got the added R&D budget and because Microsoft slowed innovation to a crawl at its symbionts. We're heading the same way in the camera world, with fully interchangeable SLRs . I am afraid RED is the only standout as they still control their product end to end.
PPS As a example imagine Marvelous Camera has committed to Lightroom, and makes clone cameras, and now wants to make a camera with a totally new sensor that has several levels of focus. How can they market this? If Adobe don't integrate the converter their innovation is unmarketable! Any company which relies on Lightroom has abdicated control of its destiny.
I think Leica is a perfect example...they decided to adopt DNG as their raw file format (and I suspect there was work behind the scenes between Leica and Adobe to make sure DNG carried the required metadata in the right form. They also adopted Lightroom as their base software. All their lenses (as far as I know, maybe only recent lenses) are also supported for lens corrections. If finicky Leica can adopt DNG and Lightroom and remain concentrated developing cameras, sensors and lenses, I think Leica is leading the way...
BTW, there IS a way of doing LCC when converting to DNG. The LCC correction has to be properly imbedded in the Opcodes in DNG and the correction will be applied upon processing. Unfortunately there's no manual way of doing that in ACR or LR–there's no UI for it. But the camera maker's software could do that or somebody could write a utility to do it.
