VinceC said:
>>People will do that with Leica too and replace their M8's by M10's, if the M10 is available.<<
Then there will be plenty of secondary-market buyers for that traded-in camera. That's no different than Leicas today.
You're right, of course. Actually used Leica bodies are probably Leica's biggest competition. For example, since they managed to convince everybody with the M4-2 that light meters aren't really necessary, I guess a number of users will have bought M6's only quite late.
However, this kind of development that you are alluding to used to take place very slowly. The pace of evolution and obsolescence with rangefinders was very slow, roughly one Leica M model every ten years on average and sometimes extremely little innovation between them. Incidentally, these very slow product cycles are an easy thing to achieve when you're the only company in the market, especially when the buyers are largely traditionalists. Development happened in the 1950s to early 60s, when Canon and Nikon where there; then in the 70s, when there was the threat of SLRs with internal metering and of compact cameras; and then, after that, only very gradually. The big innovation in the entire 1980s was, lo and behold, an internal light meter, and in the 1990s aperture priority AE when the Hexar RF demonstrated that it could be done and actually presented a formidable competitor. Snail's pace since 1965 or so. In this kind of market, of course, as a user you can swap the M
👎 for the M(n+1) every ten or fifteen years and be happy. This kind of customer behaviour in a slowly-evolving market can be quite deadly for a camera company, because you make a living out of only those users that buy your newest product, while a lot of people will buy older, obsoleted products from the early adopters. In such a situation companies are likely to start making money off services, such as CLAs, repairs and so on, which is what Leica did, and the whole image (however justified) of the Leica M as the camera that can be repaired even after a hundred years has to be seen in this context: because it allows Leica to make money from these repairs.
Digital cameras have a completely different kind product cycle; effectively they're a completely different product. Developing digital cameras is much more costly, takes skills that evolve more rapidly and has to take place faster. All Leica can hope to do is to slide into a position where they can do development at a slower pace. In order to achieve this, Leica is taking a big bet on a number of factors here that, as they hope, somehow discern their buyers from other digital camera buyers:
- Leica is hoping that Leica M body buyers are enough traditionalist in their mindset that Leica won't have to innovate at the pace Canon does. The best buyers for the M8, apart from professionals with existing large amounts of M lenses, are users that are suspicious of the pace of innovation elsewhere, yet want to have a good digital camera, too. For these users, it's OK if the camera is good now; if it becomes better too quickly, it is somehow disturbing and discourages from buying anyway. After all, nobody buys today's $5000 product if tomorrow's can be expected to be better.
- Leica is hoping that Leica M body buyers regard the difference between a digital rangefinder and the world of DSLRs as big enough that they create their own separate market, the way they did with Leica M bodies. Since the 70s Leica hasn't competed with anyone in their own niche in the camera arena until recently, because the rangefinder as a photographic tool was a market in itself, sufficiently different from SLRs. There are good indications that this is the case in the digital world, too, but it is still an assumption.
- Leica is probably hoping that development in the digital camera world will slow down at some point, so even if they develop at a slower pace the divergence won't become too great eventually - this is the argument about jumping late on a slowing bandwagon.
That's just my own set of assumptions about Leica's rationale behind development and product placement of the M8, but I think it has some merit. I wish them success.
Philipp
