But every technology ages, and the winning technology in photography is not a result of being best in one aspect, or even being very good. The winning technologies are the ones which are good enough and offer something else (connectivity, portability, low cost, etc. )
"Good enough" gets you nowhere when there are thousands of wannabe photographers for every successful one to make a living or achieve wider recognition. In many applications of photography, there is intense competition among photographers, and only the best performing technology will be considered good enough especially where technology plays a big role (such as action photography in low light with shallow depth of field). For some other applications, such as landscape photography, the technology plays a smaller role and creativity, bravery and inspiration of the photographer are more decisive. In each area of application, the best implementation survives because there are people who will pay anything for it, and then there are products which offer greater convenience along with lower performance but are popular among casual photographers.
Really, connectivity is of absolutely no consequence if you are spending weeks in the wilderness out of sight of anyone. No one cares whether you get your work online instantly, or in three weeks after properly processing it, but if you post unedited work straight from the camera, probably it will dilute your reputation as a serious photographer. If you witness a once-in-a-lifetime natural event, you may gain something by posting quickly but again a few minutes of downloading to computer and doing it right vs. instantly uploading it from the camera makes little difference, and on the calibrated monitor of a computer you can make sure it looks just right, not too dark or too light. Often it takes days or weeks of deliberation to make the decision of which edit is best on a particular image. Instant uploading in this context is not going to be of much importance. There may be news situations where it does make a difference but it is a rat race in which I certainly wouldn't want to play any part. I'm used to working in the time scale of years and decades, not seconds vs. minutes. If someone wants to be fast, they probably aren't going to be posting the most memorable image over the long term since they probably didn't have time to think and consider the image properly.
One of the problems of this time is that people post too many images and too thoughtlessly, not that image upload is "difficult" or "too slow".
Because most people don't think what they post, the audience gets bored and no one cares any more about any image because we are saturated with too many.
Nikon has successfully navigated for 100 years. But there are still turns to make. They must look not just ahead, but to the sides and maybe leave their path altogether if they want to last another 100 years.
I have no doubt Nikon continues to come up with new ideas as they have in the past.
I don't know what photography will look like then, and I won't be alive to see it either, but I do know that the DSLR will be on the shelf like some old Kodak folder.
For me the EVF draws attention of the viewer to the wrong things (high contrast outlines and artifacts) and hides what is essential to me (emotions revealed by subtle clues on the subject facial features, which I use to predict the progress of future expressions and capture the right moment through experience). The artifacts and lag are especially noticeable as one turns to follow a subject passing by. Furthermore it consumes far too much battery power and the better EVFs (with greater contrast and luminosity and faster refresh times) appear to consume even more. This is all a distraction from what is essential in photography: the subject, and in my case the emotional expression that human subjects engage in. I've tried the best of them and they are rubbish for what I want to do with a camera. Now, things may or may not change over time but this technology to me doesn't appear to show any promise that it might ever work for me. If it does one day show some promise, I am sure Nikon and Canon will be there to take advantage of it. Now, there is no question that the EVF has its own advantages and people who need those advantages use those cameras, but the entire approach of the camera is different: focus motors, measurement of focus error, viewfinder, etc. so this ripples changes required to the lenses as well and not just cameras. Lenses that work well with DSLR AF have their own advantages: they can be focused faster when the focus offset is large and the dedicated phase measurement sensor used in the DSLR can measure larger phase errors than those built into the main imaging sensor which can only measure relatively small phase errors when the lens is quite near being in focus. While there is some progress in AF using the mirrorless concept, it is not competitive for fast telephoto action since the focus needs to be very close before it can measure how far off it is. This is why Sony made the A99 II with the highest specification of their lineup and it uses their DSLR mount not their mirrorless mount: for telephoto action a separate AF sensor module works better as it provides phase offset measurements over a large range of distances even though E mount users have been claiming the A mount is dead for a while. Even Sony don't believe that mirrorless is a replacement for the DSLR (although they do believe the EVF is a replacement for the OVF).
Nikon may survive, but even companies like Kodak failed to make the right choices. They failed to look and act, and part of it was due to their attachment to the present and the past.
Kodak was a chemical company making photographic chemistry, film and paper. This technology is totally different from digital photography and I don't think there ever was a chance that they'd be successful in digital over the long term. The cards were simply not in their favor. Some others say that they could have made it if they had just emphasized the development of digital instead of film but the thing was that all the people working on film based photography would have had to be replaced with people who are experts in digital and what difference then is there whether all the people are replaced to convert to digital manufacturer, or simply to cease activities and other companies start and make digital products. If all the employees have to be replaced, which they would have had to have been, what is there left then of the old Kodak? Name only. The camera manufacturers with complete control over their lens and camera technology development had the advantage in digital. Kodak was trying to make DSLRs by modifying Nikon and Canon film cameras and that produced very clumsy products in the outcome. Even if they had created the cameras from scratch, they would not have had access to the correct protocols to run the lenses as well as the manufacturers do, without reverse engineering, or making their own lens lineups. It just doesn't seem like a recipe for success. Anyway, it makes more sense for chemists to continue on areas of industry where chemistry is needed rather than continue to learn what is needed today in digital photography. Though I guess the photography printing process still requires as much chemistry as it ever did, and perhaps this is an area where there is no reason why they couldn't continue to be successful.
