I spent my whole career involved in the field of technology when I worked for various Government military research laboratories.  Early on, I enjoyed working with new technologies but eventually I realized that there were many different technologies being pursued that would probably never make it into a weapon system.  They wouldn’t make it not because they weren’t great technological advances, but because of limited opportunities.  Only so many new weapons would make it through the development process due to lack of need and funding to replace the older ones with newer ones.  It was at this point in my career when I got involved in strategic planning.

In strategic planning we tried to match up the likelihood for future war needs with the timing for the development of those technologies with the life cycle of current weapons.  In addition, we tried to match resource availabilities with the needs.  There was never enough funding available to pursue all the new technologies so we had to match the greatest need with political moods and available funding.  Lately I have thought about the similarities of this process with photography.

I think that we have too many different camera manufacturers turning out too many similar products.  They are racing to pile on technology and cost that only moves the capability a smidgen while most of them are losing money.  I am not talking about the fact that point & shoot camera sales are way down since they are being replaced by cell phones.  I am talking about the large number of mirrorless and DSLR cameras.  There are far too many new cameras coming out every six months or so.  Many more than the market can support in the long-term.  Maybe sales are down because consumers are slowly waking up to the fact that they don’t need an evolutionary increase in more technology.  I will not be surprised to see some manufactures drop out of the camera business.