Originally posted by Tom S. What Nikon and Canon did was to makes sure pros got their hands on the latest offerings, often for free or on loan. People always imitate what professionals do, so when they saw pros using Nikons or Canons, that's what they bought. Pentax was left in the dust
This is a big part of what happened, but it's not the entire story. Nikon and Canon not only got products into pros hands, they made the kind of products the pros wanted. Nikon always made a better system camera than Pentax. Nikon also had a big advantage with its bayonet mount, which was more convenient to use then the Pentax screw-mount, and which had the additional advantage of locking their consumers into their product line, since their lenses couldn't be used with any other camera brand. Canon did an excellent job of getting a head start with two of the most important technologies to transform SLR photography: auto-focus and digital. Marketing won't work just by itself. You got to deliver the goods. And Canon and NIkon make better system cameras than Pentax. The have better AF, better flash, better support, more lenses, more accessories. It makes a lot more sense for pros to go with these systems (assuming the pros have deep pockets).
It also has to be admitted that Pentax made a number of poor decisions between 1985 and 2005, when they have appeared to have lost a substantial portion of their base. They were two years late to the AF party and even later to the DSLR party. One of Pentax's major innovations in the nineties, the powerzoom, was gimmicky and didn't provide any sort of competitive advantage over Canon and Nikon. They still made some great prime lenses, often better than equivalent offerings from Canon and Nikon, but the market was becoming dominated by zooms, and hardly anyone seemed to notice that Pentax "king of primes" among the Japanese lens makers.
They've continued to repeat some of their old mistakes. Releasing the K200D without a WR kit lens was not very smart. And then releasing a WR kit lens without a lower end WR camera body to go with it continued the error. Finally, with the release of K30, they've gotten it right. With their small market share, they need to avoid such errors. Hopefully, this floundering about without any kind of coherent, integrated strategy will not continue under Ricoh's leadership.