There’s something that Roger points out about the engineering/manufacturing feedback loop that’s worth a little attention. What follows is my take on it, not necessarily Roger’s.
During pilot runs, engineering gets feedback from the line and from alpha, testing beta testing, and teardowns. After release to manufacturing, in the absence of spot checks, which can only test what they’re looking for, feedback to engineering has to come from the people servicing the lenses.
The closer the service organization is to the engineering department, both in physical space and in spirit, the tighter this feedback loop will be and the more likely that design decisions that cause field problems will be changed and those problems will be fixed. This means that, in the absence of a sophisticated program to gather field data, outsourcing repair of cameras and lenses will create a situation in which design (and manufacturing, although I haven’t addressed that specifically) problems are not fixed.
Are you listening, Sony?
Just saw this post. I wonder if a corporation like Sony could possibly achieve such a thing. Not because they are indifferent, but because they are necessarily a large organization with many irons in the fire. Most Minolta people (especially, less so Konica I think) seemed to despair when Sony took over for precisely this reason.
And it has played out that way to a certain degree. What is miraculous AFAIC is that Sony has done as good a job as it has done so far, given that it is a super-tanker of a company. And I think it has to do with 2 things. The first is what got Sony involved with the purchase of Konica-Minolta in the first place: someone high up the food chain–not an engineer or maybe a former engineer, no knock on engineers, but someone with a death-ray business acumen— understood that Sony could come to dominate the sensor markets if they moved fast—sensors that would be used for cameras and smartphones, of course, but a host of other things we haven’t seen yet. So, the camera division gets to do some things that other companies, Camera Companies, wouldn’t dare do, because they are advancing some agenda that has been approved at the very highest levels.
Now, this first thing could happen with any large corporation from any company. The second thing, however, is that Sony is a Japanese company, and there is really some deep-seated pride in Japan about the products they produce. I went to Japan for the first time this past October, and what knocked me out the most was how design goodness and aesthetics pervade everything (so much so that it’s glaringly apparent when they don’t, unlike here in the U.S. where the situation is entirely reversed…). So, missteps aside, Sony actually needs to be proud of their products for reasons beyond the commercial. BTW, that has been evident to me at the Sony booth at PDN PhotoExpo for several years. The Japanese guys manning the booth, and they often outnumber the westerners 2 or 3 to one, showed genuine, really genuine, pride in the products and glee when it was apparent that people were responding positevely and understanding the cameras: The NEX line, especially the NEX7, the RX1 series, the A7 series. But they were all proud of the tech. The handling was of less concern, it seemed.
Just my observations.