What a timing! Both m43 partners announced a new CEO and President.
Olympus named Hiroyuki Sasa (medical equipment marketing) as president and Yasuyuki Kimoto (Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp.) is the new chairman. Sasa said: “My duty is to win back as soon as possible the trust from everyone and repair this damaged brand.” (Source: Engadget)
Panasonic named Kazuhiro Tsuga new CEO of the company. He was the one guy pushing Panasonic to support Blue-ray in the famous HD-DVD versus Blue-ray battle. You know who won 🙂 So this may be a good sign for his talent. (Source: Engadget)
Anyway, hope both companies can recover from their recent financial (and not only) issues.
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Maybe they could start to cooperate again
Good luck to both of them.. and I hope that, regarding m4/3, they will join their effort to a single direction instead of losing energy fighting!
Did they fight? I wasn’t aware of that.
I know not also. 😀
Well it was certainly not friendly of Panasonic to suddenly refuse to supply Oly with their latest sensor. “Stabbing an ally from the back” may be a more apt description of what Pana did to Oly.
Imagine if these two companies merged!! Woow
Olympus version heat pump to me, please thanks. 😉
Now is the job to win back no 1 ranking in mirrorless for Pana & Olympus . No sales but image quality from the system they established .
Is Blu-ray really winner? I just put all my Blu-rays to the box last week and moved them to the storage room 😉
Blu-ray is and was clear winner to HD-DVD as optical storage format…
But the time copyright industry MAFIAA spent cooking use limiting systems just meant that format was too late for its capacity to challenge for example external 2.5″ HDDs as movable big capacity storage.
HDDs unfortunately have significantly lower long term reliability.
Cheap Chinese low quality optical storage blanks don’t have any sure long term reliability regardless how good write quality recording drive does.
And with capacity of HDDs per price you can very easily buy two drives and for example give another to your friend for storing in case of house fire.
And in amount of use done by average consumers most HDDs probably fail to hiding manufacturing defects/weaknesses in a failure mode known as infant mortality. Good stress testing (like various surface scans/tests with HDDScan) before taking drive to actual storage use would lower probability of those turning up later.
Besides you should use two storing medias also with high quality optical storage blanks which fast makes big piles of them with the amount of data you can easily produce with digicams even without taking video clips.
Great. So we can hope to see some Sony sensors in m43 cameras instead of flogging that old pana horse.
Just as to be expected. A return to core business and a banker running things. Probably the worst thing that could have happened, oh well, we got some good lenses out of it, and it was fun while it lasted. Thanks for the memories Oly!
Many of the articles on their continued losses have said it was due to the camera division and continued writeoffs, but the more detailed analyses show that most of the lastest losses were from the writeoffs. I have not seen any detailed breakdowns of where losses in the camera division are occurring. Mirrorless cameras are surging in Japanese sales, while regular DSLR sales are dropping. Olympus is doing quite well in that mirrorless market, and their margins are higher in that field. I would think that the cut-throat point-and-shoot market might be where the camera division is having the most trouble.
The Olympus announcements are just proposed changes, and will not be official unless the are approved at the 20 April stockholder meeting. I know there has been a lot of public comment from the non-Japanese investors in Olympus that the Japanese stockholders and creditors are stacking the deck and in effect performing a creditor takeover of the company. Some of the Olympus comments in reaction to outside investor comments appear to be disingenuous or outright falsehoods (e.g. Sasa saying he was unaware of any proposals for capital tie-ups from outside companies). So it appears that there may still be problems between traditional Japanese management culture and outside investors. Continued management turmoil cannot help the company.