I  was reading the luminious landscape comments on the Nikon Z7 release and some items in the article raised major red flags for me.

I’ve copied a paragraph from the article to give you some context of what I am talking about:

“It seems that a long time ago, Nikon fell out of grace with Luminous-Landscape — or should I say, Luminous-Landscape fell out of the graces of Nikon. From what I heard, it was due to something Michael had said. Those of you who knew Michael know that he called it as he saw it, and I suppose he said something that Nikon didn’t like. I also wrote a story about Saying Goodbye to My Nikon when I made the switch to mirrorless years ago. Since then, we never hear from Nikon.”

I think this is the big problem with manufacturers who don’t listen to their customers. Ultimately, blogs, magazines, photography pages are all customers. They are giving the customer and market perspectives of camera gear back to Nikon and Nikon should be taking this feedback and incorporating it into their future roadmap to produce better cameras. Instead their response is to squash these naysayers, which is really just sweeping the problem under the carpet. Sooner or later the stench is going to force you to clean it up.

Thom Hogan has long complained about Nikon’s failure to listen to customers and I think this is also one of those cases. When I switched from Nikon 3 years ago, the primary issue I raised was Nikon’s failure to listen to what customers were asking for, namely mirrorless. The problem was twofold:

1. Nikon weren’t listening, in fact, they weren’t even asking.
2. Nikon weren’t telling people what direction they were going so you had no visibility of whether you wanted to stay around.

After 3 years, they finally listened to what customers were asking for from a mirrorless perspective, but the problem this article highlights is they only listened in part, so they still aren’t listening. I suspect the only reason they listened is because they were losing too much market share not to listen.

If you look at the Z6/Z7, there is still much wrong which simply should have been addressed as all it would have taken was a basic bit of market surveying to see what made the current models on the market successful. I would have started with the A7iii, A7riii, X-T2 etc and used those as benchmarks for what could be improved.

My major concern now is whether the online publications will bow down to Nikon’s “demand” for better reviews, because online publications need access to the latest news and reviews to keep their readership up. It’s heading into murky territory either way.