Markets of two: Microsoft, Nikon, Canon and Sony
We all know about the market of two rule: Mostly only two companies get the big market share in each market. Coke/Pepsi, McDonalds/Burger King, Aldi/Lidl (in Germany), Boeing/Airbus. For a long time this was true with game consoles. There was Atari/Collecovision and later Nintendo/Sega. When Sony entered the console market, they squeezed Sega out.
Then came Microsoft, with no clear 2 company situation right now, Sony clearly leads (> 100M PS2 sold) with Nintendo and Microsoft at a second place (with both around 20M sold). Sony entered the hand held market, a clever idea as there was only one company. We’ll see how the next generation market plays out with the X360 in the lead, Sony a strong contender (although too expensive, this ist not the PS2 situation when everyone wanted a DVD) and Nintendo with a clever concept: attrack non-gamers, be the cheapest, have games with new ideas.
The IDE market looks the same, with Eclipse and IDEA the most used IDEs by the people I know (although it seems that Jbuilder is still very strong with SMEs). We’ll see how Netbeans, as an IDE which gets some traction, will stirr up that market. As an IDEA user I hope they don’t squeeze out Intellij.
The point of this post: I consider buying a new digital camera (DSLR). After being a Canon-man for a long time, I’m considering buying a Nikon camera. I have currently no investment in lenses anymore so I’m free to buy what I like. I think I might buy a Canon 400d, but the Nikon D80 just feels better, has better usability and doesn’t look as cheap.
Update: Some years later I did bougth quite a lot of Olympus gear and love it.
Right now Sony has seriously entered the DSLR market with their Sony A100. It has nice features and a competitive price. As Canon ist the clear leader, Canon won’t be squeezed out of the market, so either it’s Nikon or Sony won’t be successful. What to do? :-)
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If I were you, I would stick with Canon! Canon is producing from A to Z of the products with all in-house-developed and proven quality technologies. From the camera sensor and things around to lenses, optics and so. The other ones (including Nikon and Sony) usually have some of the key pieces to be produced in other leading companies.
After all, it’s very hard to ignore Nikon but not Sony, since it’s not a serious competitor for the moment. A100 does not do well at all on higher ISOs and is not as fast as Canon and Nikon ones, from what I’ve seen on the photos.