Originally posted by Rorschach I find all this anguish very amusing...it is just a camera after all, a gadget. So stop cutting your wrists over the delay of a gadget for your hobby.
Sure, that's the reality. Since satisfaction is the result of the difference between what customers expect and what they get. Customer satisfaction comes from expectation management, ideally, a company would never oversell their products, or they'd offer some goodies on top of expectations. Also, we can always assume that companies are competent or incompetent. Truth be told , there are differences between people, not all sport people are able to achieve the same performance and they do not cost the same, etc... the same goes in the corporate world, it's
generally easier for top ranked companies to attract the best talents. On the forum, some claim incompetence, some defend it, but there can be some incompetence, even sometimes due to internal politics, a company is not able to do it right. In corporate life, there's a difference between being economically correct and being politically correct. I've see marketers defining products with zero value, just because they had to define new products to avoid having their job position irrelevant, such things are harmful for the company but possible. In Japan, corporate culture is even more tricky to deal with because employees are not welcome to criticize management decisions, so the big boss decides and everyone has to follow, and when there's a big issue, everyone has to wait to the approval of everyone else to fix it. As for confidentiality excuses regarding delivering infos to markets, most companies I've seen claiming they can't communication to keep secrets have failed. The reason is simple, companies have to keep focus on a strategy that is decided based on their internal capabilities and what others can't do, so even if Pentax was telling their approach to Canon, Canon would not change their product line to copy the Pentax approach. Furthermore, is employees resign from Pentax and go working for Nikon, or Canon, Nikon or Canon will have the internal infos anyway. So all that miss-communication of Pentax with their customer base is just rubbish. All that matter is to manage customers expectation is a good way, always under-promise and over-deliver and everything will be fine. Easy to remember In two words: Expectations Management !