43rumors reader W. (Thanks) shared that image of the official answer he got from Olympus. The Open Platform project will take place in Japan only. So there is no way for non-Japanese residents to join the program 🙁
opc.olympus-imaging.com/tools/#opc
43rumors reader W. (Thanks) shared that image of the official answer he got from Olympus. The Open Platform project will take place in Japan only. So there is no way for non-Japanese residents to join the program 🙁
opc.olympus-imaging.com/tools/#opc
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51 Responses
Olympus just gave all gaijin the finger.
The Doraemon bamboo helicopter accessories looks amazing
Yes , It is amazing .
Made in tribute for Doraemon ,
I guess .
This stinks of the sort of the “open” you get when a company does not really understand what it means to build an open community. They somehow think they will be able to build an exclusive but “open” project. And when they say open they really mean that they will get free work and innovation from a community whilst giving nothing back in return. In short this will fail, unless Oly wake up and do it properly.
Well, we knew from the start it was already ridiculous, because if they had wished to go open, they would have released SDK for already available cameras
Yeah, I was afraid of that from the beginning. And this move does not bode well. On the other hand, this decision might just be the result of:
a) not really having confidence in the project and enough resources to support worldwide community, and the Japan only policy is there to make the trial run as cheap as possible
b) the project is in very early stages and there’s actually nothing to build the community around
But even if it’s those two reasons, it just reinforces the feeling that they probably don’t really know what they want to achieve with this. Apart from free work and innovation obviously. They will probably kill the project once they get what they want from the community.
>”Not having enough resources to support worldwide community.”
If true, this seems like one of those loops that lead you to failure. If there really is so much enthusiasm over such a project worldwide that they’d need to dedicate more resources, that would tend to be an indicator of potential success. You want to invest in such projects, not divest and isolate.
>”Probably don’t really know what they want to achieve with this.”
One would hope: sales. It seems paternalistic and odd to restrict that potential right up front by disenfranchising potential customers.
Someone earlier wrote about Olympus being mostly Japan/Asia. Yes, at least in cameras they’ve been retreating towards that emphasis. It’s where their best successes have been. However, Olympus is a global company, and if it’s going to grow, it needs to be globally focused. When you limit yourself to a territory, you also allow competitors to jump in and do what you aren’t doing in other territories.
Exactly, that’s why this decision is worrying.
The idea of advanced imaging devices aimed at homebrew/diy/hacker market is very compelling to me. I dabble in astrophotography for example, and I’ve seen plenty of examples of people doing crazy mods to their cameras. There are even companies that offer modding or sell modded cameras. Releasing modding friendly camera (full remote access in itself is huge deal for this) would probably revolutionize this market.
As I see it, Olympus could literally create a new market with this, and pretty much be the only player. But that would require totally different thinking and approach. This probably can’t be done if you’re stuck in your corporate thinking, so it probably won’t happen. Someone else will do it, like the creators of Raspberry Pi or Arduino did a few years back. They truly commited to the idea of openness and reached tremendous success.
All I care is good bodies and lenses. I don’t give a sh what other things Olympus do
Moving on… next.
that’s racist
Great. This mean YOU and YOUR country is ready to pay and support whatever happened to this world without discrimination.
My country does, as long as the owners of the planet want so.
Calling a simple and altogether not too important market/resources decision “racist” is a trivialization of racism.
Hear hear!
I love to hear about this new anti racist religion, the most hypocritical ever, propagated by the same countries who bomb the rest of the world every day. We could draw parallels between anti racists, anti homophobes and m43 fans, and place bets on who is dumbest.
No idea what you’re talking about, except that you seem to think anti-racism and anti-homophobia are a bad thing, at which point further discussion has already become futile and the question of who is dumbest is fully answered as well. Another indication for its answer being your idea those movements were “propagated” by “countries”. And, just as a side note, I, for one, am not only not talking for any country whatsoever, I am not even a resident of one of those that you seem to have in mind.
So, you have no idea but you have a (pointless) comment ready? Are you a happy boy?
Regarding the latter, I can assure you that there’s definitely no reason to worry. Regarding the former, I have more than enough of an idea to see the direction of the statement, even if the person can’t properly articulate himself, and rest assured that I have always a comment or two ready for racists and homophobes, and while it may indeed be pointless in as far as these tend to be immune to help, it is necessary to publicly oppose publicly accosting people wherever they rear their ugly heads.
Nationalist? Protecting-your-interests-ist?
Poor Olympus, can’t even afford to pay a part-time translator.
It might just be that they can manage this without the rest of the world, although we westerners usually do know much better what’s good for Olympus. We’ll see how this ends.
(Hoping you are being sarcastic and not horribly paternalistic)
Haha! Yes, I would hate myself if that was really my opinion.
There’s a heck of a lot of foreigners in Japan who feel they know what’s better for Japan than the Japanese so I wasn’t sure 😉
I have never been there, I guess I better be careful with this kind of comments then 😉
There are plenty of non-Japanese who think that anime truly represents Japanese life, too.
There is truly no reason to think the Western world was better in anything, as the Western world, its totalitarian (while claiming to constitute “freedom”) economic system combined with its military is primarily responsible for the dire state the Earth is in (not that Japan wasn’t a major part in it, too), but given that Olympus’ primary markets are outside Japan, it might indeed be wise for Olympus to listen to Westerners, too. Just as it would have saved Olympus quite some damage if it would have listened to Michael Woodford when he was CEO instead of firing him…
Olympus’ primary camera market is Japan and Asia, unless you mean endoscopes.
Back-firing Woodford was a big mistake, see “Olympus Tobashi Scheme”
Forgive me, but dealing with westerners is always difficult, not just because western languages are a mess but because the idealism is toward individuality, not consensus. After all these years of living amongst Americans, I still do not understand why they’re slow to agree on anything useful. As bad as Japan’s legislature is, they get much more done for the people than the U.S. Congress.
While I still think the big Japanese camera manufacturers should perhaps listen more to westerners, too, before they decide upon their product policies, I completely agree with what you say here. Many westerners, especially in America, still seem to learn from the cradle that individualism is good and consensus and cooperation are bad. Another reason for the problems of western legislature, of course, is the strong interdependency (if we want to use a neutral term) between industry and legislature.
Hehehe I agree, there would be so much to say here about the champions of freedom and democracy… 🙂
Google is a western company that makes inroads in many places and they don’t listen to any outside influence–or test with people not already part of their organization, apparently. They claim to be open, by using free contributions to make themselves more powerful, and developers fall for it in the name of vanity.
Totally true. I really didn’t want to suggest that western companies’ policies (or their commitment to “openness”, whenever they talk about it) were any better.
Simply because Olympus is aware this kind of stuff aka Doraemon style not going to success outside Japan .
I hope you’re only pretending that you don’t understand it’s just a simplified drawing.
Since the invention of “open source”, it has been and it will always stay fascinating to watch how companies continue to misuse the word “open” in their commercial interests.
Exactly. Open means there are no limits who can use the tech or where. Only thing is required is that everyone has same rights as the others.
Not very open. Not very important or Olympus believes it can obtain all the answers in Japan.
And I think that’s a real issue. We all know that Japan is basically iterating and that software isn’t their forte. Yet such a project really needs to be about innovating and software will be the primary core of that. Not involving the world that knows how to do that best is a big mistake, IMHO.
I come from a software development background and in the old days, Japan was where we manufactured product, not conceived it.
Didn’t Olympus announce the OPC in conjunction with M.I.T.?
Apparently MIT speaks Japanese ;~).
This probably has everything to do with where their testing and development is being done. Having a team at Olympus communicating with developers is one thing, opening offices all over the world to do the same thing (or employing english speaking developers) would cost more.
This appears to be a “soft launch” and if anything comes from it I am sure it will roll out very quickly.
Since when is open source developed locally?
When it is in a language spoken in only one place.
This probably received close to zero interest since most ppl are more interested about Apertus open source cinema that this Olympus thing tried to compete against.
I suspect if someone interested was in Fukuoka or even further south, the company would probably tell them that they were too far away from Olympus’ headquarters to be a useful part of the project.
Corporations, especially conservative ones like Olympus, are the last bastions of central planning. Why do they feel such an initiative must be “managed” in the first place? If they were serious about getting the community involved in enhancing their products, they could just open up [some of?] their firmware sources and let ‘er rip. People would come up with all kinds of creative applications, a la CHDK, and Olympus could then pick and choose whatever they found worthy of inclusion in official releases. Or nothing at all, which would leave them no worse off than they are now, except with a ton of added good will.
These “hacker” programs, peppered with the buzzwords du jour (maker, geek, hacker, etc.) are just another marketing scheme. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but if they want to get the real $$ available from an open-source strategy, they will need to really embrace the community, not just pretend to.
Ha ha ha ha.
LOL some open systems are more open than others. By now, anyone looking for this sort of image quality and (more or less) open software has been buying phones, no need to buy this stuff.