Today's headline is a baseball metaphor because I know the Japanese understand baseball. I'm going to use the company I know best for my examples, but don't read too much into that: I can write essentially the same article about Canon, Fujifilm, OMDS, Panasonic, and Sony. This is a cultural problem, not a corporate one. It's time to shift the culture.
Swing and a Miss
Let's start with the most recent Swing-and-a-Miss. That would be the Nikon Coolpix P1100. You know those times when the staff finishes a product as shouts "nailed it!" Well, Nikon's staff finished the project and said whispered "mailed it!” (As in “mailed it in.”)
What was the R&D budget for the P1100, 100 yen? Notes from management to staff said (1) replace serial port with USB-C; (2) do something that says "birds" in the menus. Mailed it!
Let me be frank (okay, let me be thom ;~): the lens in the P1000 (and now in the P1100) was for the most part wasted in that camera. I personally prefer the P950 in terms of function and handling. 3000mm equivalent is really tough to handle hand-held, and the snap-back-for-tracking feature is too slow to be functional, particularly when combined with the sluggish autofocus performance. Still, for static subjects you can manage to locate at 3000mm, the lens pretty much does a solid Nikkor telephoto job. In a word, excellent. This just once again proves that Nikon knows optics as well as anyone. Too bad they sometimes fail to prove they know cameras all that well.
I really don't have a lot of issue with the image sensor, either, even though it's a small one (1/2.3"). I've spent enough time with the camera to know that I can massage a lot out of the raw files if I get everything else right. Heck, even the simplified functions and menus are livable.
Where the P1000 (and now P1100) fall down is in making 3000mm useful. Focus performance and finding/following the subject, to be specific. And nothing was done to improve that in the new model. Worse still, there's not a single thing that the marketing department can do to regenerate any interest in this camera, as there's not even a bit of new product grizzle for them to chew on. That said, Nikon Marketing took a big swing at it with the press release (title: "Reach for the Stars") but in the end this launch was a total miss. Zero new interest at dealers on a product most people had forgotten about for good reasons.
So let's dream about the perfect swing for a moment. Simply put EXPEED7 and phase detect on sensor into the package that already exists. As Nikon just showed with the Z50II and Zf, even with older, slower image sensors this makes a substantial and important difference (plus there was a far better "birds" to add to the camera ;~). Personally, I would have done that with the P950 instead, but Nikon is trying to claim the supersuperzoom crown, so sure, P1000 it is.
Staring at Pitches
Nikon truly left the compact market—and by that I mean the highly capable compact—just prior to launching the Z System. The Nikon J5 was arguably one of the better compacts Nikon had produced. Nikon management apparently looked at the waning Nikon 1 sales as a product failure, not the management failure it actually was.
Beyond just staring at the obvious problem and not doing anything different for seven years, management also mostly misread the market, believing that the need for a shirt pocket compact no longer existed. Another stare at a perfectly good pitch and doing nothing.
The J5 was a perfectly fine 20mp compact when it appeared in 2015. Its image quality level would still be relevant today, what with the EXPEED improvements it would have received. But Nikon had already stopped making new lenses for the Nikon 1 line, and that was apparent to anyone paying attention. Moreover, Nikon never really got the Nikon 1 lens set right in the first place: they took a couple of practice swings and then stood in the box doing not much of anything as the pitches passed them by.
The Z30 now pretty much takes the place of the J5, though at a bit of a size penalty. So it's clear that Nikon management understands that there might be something to swing at, but they still keep hesitating with their actual swing and claim they're swinging at a different pitch (apparently they see only a "creator" on the mound). I suspect a Z30II is coming, what that PC button being important to that pitcher. But we still have issues of not seeing the full pitch dynamics and then not swinging fully. Plus we're back in the no action realm in the lens bullpen, so even if Nikon gets the camera (swing) right, they still might not manage to win the game.
Lack of Team Play
I've written now for more than three decades that Nikon's number one problem is that they don't interact with their customers. They seem to think of themselves as just a bunch of engineers doing business-to-business things with other engineers. Hmm. The last reported financial numbers say something entirely different: 46% of their sales and 540% of their profit comes from just camera and lens consumers.
We camera buyers should feel like we're part of the team. Do you feel like part of the team? Getting Nikon Japan to recognize anything with their cameras that needs changing because of the way we use it is like looking for a dentist using only road signs in upper Mongolia. I'll give you a recent example: with the Z50II I finally helped get Nikon to make Focus point display > AF-C in-focus display default to On. This was after spending time trying to convince them that AF-C in-focus display should actually be built in (it's not the default on the Z9, Z8, Z6III, or Zf, where we finally got a function to even turn it on).
It shouldn't be that hard. Serious, core, influential Nikon users know exactly what does/doesn't work or needs fixing. That's because we're part of the team: we're actually on the field playing the game. Management seems to be up in the Owner's Box sipping sake and swapping investment suggestions.
Here's my wish: let me put together a group of nine players (pro users), bring them to Japan, and have them spend a day telling everyone at Nikon exactly where the problems really are. What we'd buy and what we'll ignore. How we actually play the game and why we're still missing some critical gear.
My local Philadelphia Eagles just won the Super Bowl. You don't get that far without a "team." Apparently the night prior to the game, they had a special team meeting. It wasn't the usual meeting with the coaches telling the players what they can/can't/should/shouldn't do. Instead, each of the veteran players got up and shared their views. By the time all the speechifying and rallying was done—apparently left tackle Jordan Mailata picked up the podium, shook it, and just yelled "One More!"—the reports are that the coaches and players actually left that meeting feeling more together as a team than ever, and you saw that in the first half of the game if you watched it.
When was the last time you saw a photographer and a camera company 100% on the same page like that?
