Wow timo, way to drop a stinkbomb and run for the exit.
Good point though, sort of.
Personally, I don't think there's much we should/could do, frankly, since it'll take care of itself. This is just the way a product lifecycle works. For those of you who know it, skip this, but it goes something like: invention, slow adoption, burst of innovation, widespread use, gradual hardening, stable, declining, dead (or reinvented as something else). We're very much in the innovation phase, so product cycles are short and meaty - lots of significant improvement, lots of market differentiation. As the curve flattens out and incremental improvement gets harder and more expensive, product cycles will lengthen and improvements will be less compelling (i.e., we'll quit buying a new camera every two years).
The housing folks would get killed if they stuck to the old model; they can't afford to invest that much on a system that's obsolete in 6 months, and neither can we. What I'd rather see is comparable innovation in housings. You're basically putting a fairly powerful computer inside a box; there's got to be a way to exploit that better. Maybe it could be like the ipod; when I plug my ipod into my car stereo's ipod jack, I can control it through the car radio, not the ipod - there's no reason to maintain that interface. When they come out with a new ipod, it'll probably work just fine with my car radio. Imagine a housing like that - connected to your camera via USB, no hole-through knobs/buttons since you wouldn't need to press anything on the camera, just a standard set of electronic buttons or touch-screen interface. Then, when a new model was released, you could buy a software update instead of a new housing. Or with this new generation of wireless-enabled cameras, what about a way to upload pics on the boat without opening the housing? No more changing memory cards, dripping water on your camera, and increasing the risk of a flood.
If someone actually does something like that I want a cut, of course.
Edited by tjgreen, 06 February 2008 - 12:35 PM.