Shove your crowdfunded camera up your asses, Canon

[Atamasama]

@iamthewalrus_3

It’s definitely true that that was the original idea behind Kickstarter, but I think it’s unnecessary to limit it to that. Lots of great ideas (like Kickstarter) start out as one thing but end up getting used for different (but also good) things.

Despite the suggestion in your post and the linked article that Kickstarter is mostly used by people with great ideas who don’t have enough capital to produce them (the article even suggests that it’s charity with the “begging for dollars” phrasing), I think that’s mostly not true. Even most small players probably could fund their ideas. What they can’t do is figure out which ideas are worth funding. The critical value that Kickstarter provides is not the capital necessary to produce a good: it’s an idea of how big the market is. If you can get 1000 people to preorder something, then you know you can make and sell at least 1000 of them. If you can’t it’s probably not worth making any. That problem exists for big companies too. They can sort of solve it expensively with market surveys, but why not solve it better by just getting people to line up before production? Is there so much animus for large companies that they should have to waste money figuring out what people want to buy instead of just asking them?

I think we should analyze this based on whether it has good results. It seems to me that it’s going to result in a better product/market fit for everyone, less wasted effort on products that aren’t really what people want. Is there actually a downside here except for a sort of aesthetic purity argument?

I’m not super convinced by the argument that this kind of thing is going to crowd out low-capital startups. Those kids with a camera startup are mostly going to succeed or fail based on the merits of their ideas. It’s not like people who are backing camera-startups on Kickstarter are somehow unaware of Canon and its offerings. And success looks very different for them anyway. A legit camera startup on Kickstarter is going to be a success if it sells a few thousand of their thing. Canon is operating on an entirely different scale.

I don’t disagree with you at all, I think crowd funding has evolved and I think that’s a good thing. For those who want it to be used for its original purpose that evolution is seen as a threat and I can understand why. I personally bristled when I saw folks like David Lynch and Spike Lee use crowd funding to make films. I thought… Really? You really need the funding to make it work? But then I realized that it’s a good thing for a film budget to come from fans and not studios limiting what the filmmaker can do. So my opinion is also evolving.

I’m not sure I’m okay with “megacorporations” doing it. Like, if Amazon wanted to create a new video game streaming service and used Kickstarter to fund it (offering an increasing number of months of free service for different pledge levels) that seems crass. But maybe that’s okay. If it means that they get an idea before putting much money and people into the project how much interest there is, is that really bad? I might even pledge if it looked promising enough.