Kaizen: Fuji’s reasoning behind the sequence of firmware upgrades | Bill Palmer

Last week ago Michael Evans wrote about Fuji’s policy of offering firmware upgrades to bring older cameras as near as possible to later releases. It’s a policy that most Fuji owners appreciate. Fuji refer to it as kaizen. My venerable X-Pro 1 has been continually rejuvenated over the years by Fuji’s commendable firmware upgrade programme. Here it is in fully updated mode alongside the new 35mm f/2 and the old 27mm pancake lens Kaizen (改善), according to Wikipedia (remember when Encyclopaedia Britannica was the fount of all knowledge?), is the Japanese term for „improvement“, or more literally, „change for better“. Pretty well anyone in business concerned with manufacturing or logistics and supply chain will be familiar with the term. It’s also trendy to apply it willy-nilly to all sorts of endeavours from song-writing to weight loss. In the Fujifilm sense it applies to their willingness (note that I don’t use the word „policy”—more of that later) to improve upon products that have already been released into the market through making available free firmware upgrades.  The most recent of these, for the X-E2, effectively brings it almost on a par with the X-E2S. Why should Fuji do such a thing? Are they not, to all intents and purposes, cannibalising their own sales? …

Source: macfilos.com