Originally posted by Racer X 69 Allow me to answer.
Any successful company gets that way by responding to feedback from their customer. Noisy or otherwise. And most people prefer to complain rather than praise.
The customer is always right.
Ignore the customer, and kill your business.
But is that true?
There seem to be three problems with listening to the customer:
First, there is no "the customer" in photography. There's a spectrum of first-timers, photography-enthusiasts, gear-enthusiasts, brand-enthusiasts, status-symbol-enthusiasts, and pros. And then there's all the genres of photography: landscape, product, architecture, macro, wildlife (of various sizes, distances, and speeds), portrait, weddings, sports, drunken bicyclists, etc. All these different customers provide different feedback and demand different things. These demands sometimes conflict with each other and they always compete for R&D and manufacturing cost budget. Some customers are a lot harder to satisfy than others.
Second, the customer may simply be wrong. They may think a feature is really cool and really essential but not realize it comes with unintended negative consequences to performance, ergonomics, battery life, etc. Sometimes, even the noisy customer themselves would discover that they hate the camera they asked for.
Third, the volume of the voices of the complainers can be entirely divorced from the volume of sales even if the company does listen. One loud mouth is not the majority and talk is cheap. Even if the company does what the noisy customer demands, there is no guarantee that the noisy customer and others will buy. Haters gotta hate. That's especially true if the camera's price must increase to cover the R&D and manufacturing costs of the requested feature.
Sometimes listening to the customer can kill the business, too.
The challenge for the company, especially a smaller one like Pentax, is to decide which subset of customers to listen to and ignore the rest no matter how noisy they get.