I Was Wrong

Back in 2011 I told Nikon executives that it was not useful to pursue a relationship with a phone maker. Others at the time, particularly Leica, were doing so. My contention was that the overall sales and margins on the R&D and supply for the small sensor/lens combo would be too small to pursue. Just licensing the Nikon name would have been a better economic choice, and there you’re still only talking about peanuts. Meanwhile, I believed that the camera-as-lens attachment ideas both Olympus and Sony pursued wouldn’t work either, because they had a dual problem: (1) they had to control said camera-as-lens from an app; and (2) communication would be via bluetooth/Wi-Fi, which is notoriously unreliable as a full-time solution. #1 meant that the result would be an add-on and live on top of the software stacks, undermining performance. #2 meant fiddly settings and lagging connectivity. I’ll still stand by those statements, but I wasn’t thinking enough out of the box (unusual for me). Now…