Are you really under the impression that michael's scheme gets perfect exposure every time? Point it at the sun and think through what happens.
Then think about how you'd fix it. Congratulations, you just invented Matrix Metering. Which is available now.
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"In a shrinking market you must start listening to your customers" is exactly the kind of thing that's obvious, but not even necessarily true.
If you are trapped in a shrinking market, you plan for how to be the dominant surviving player. That means that you need to:
1) survive
2) be dominant when the smoke clears
Survival is hard. Going big at a time when you need to be shrinking your company without destroying it might not be the right choice. Cutting staff cheaply and with minimum pain might involve offering many of your senior people generous severance packages, which is going to interfere a lot with your ability to deliver nifty new features. If you have any sense at all, you're spending a lot of engineering effort cleaning your bills of materials, planning for a simplified product line. You might be
looking at how to cut things back to a smaller number of base platforms, and a smaller number of pluggable modules, while still being able to deliver a sensible
range of products.
You're spending engineering resources on scaling the company down, safely.
USB 3.0? Get serious. Call me when the other guys deliver USB 3.0. In fact, call me when the other guys do it and it moves the needle on their sales. We're busy
trying to figure out how to cut the company in half without killing it.
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Pile all the features you can think of into one camera? Great idea! How do you price this thing?
Price the camera low, let's say $1700, and now you can never sell a camera for more than that. EVER. Whoops. Where the hell did all my margin go?
Price the camera high, let's say $6000, and the internet explodes in fury at your stupid pricing model and nobody buys the damn thing.
And what product do you follow it with?
Now it's next year. What are we going to build? Aren't we done? We built the all-singing all-dancing camera, and now, even if we had any money which we don't (see above) what on earth would we spend it developing? Does the armchair/internet businessman answer now change to "well, build some cameras with fewer features. You know, what you were doing before you went broke following my advice?"