Hi Didzis,
I do not want to promote anything. I am neither an employee of any of those brands, nor am I financially benefitting, if Sony will offer Zeiss lenses
I have no news from my side regarding Zeiss lenses by the way.
The success of Sony DSLR future lives and dies with the KM mount. Do not overinterprete the interview. Sony does not want to sell its cameras only to new users. The whole strategy only works, if they can convince NOW all old Minolta users not to switch the brand/lens mount. Especiall all users, who are still in analogue photography.
Here is the phrase of the interview again:
"...To successfully create this culture, it's not enough to offer a body and two or three lens options, which is why, starting this summer, we will launch more than 20 new lens models over the course of a year. Combined with the over 16 million compatible lenses that have been sold to date, we are bringing our entire camera culture toward an ever-expanding future for our customers...."
For me the wording "new lens models" means really new models, no rebadging. Although I am cautious with this interpretation, since the purpose of such an interiew is always marketing and because of this, you never know exactly what they mean until you see it on your table
The next phrase: "...Combined with the over 16 million compatible lenses that have been sold to date..."
Is only a nice try to show people that Minolta is not a dead brand to be avoided by new costumers. The mesage is: it is still alive with a big community of 16 million lenses so far, who like their KM system. The logic behind it IMHO: You do not want to buy a car which nobody else wants to buy, right?
So why do they write all this? I think they have looked at the Olympus E-System dilemma and and the Contax N system dilemma and try now to avoid a similar route. It is not enough nowadays to have a good system in place. You need to give the buyer the feeling, that he is investing his money in a system that survives also in 3 years. And an advanced amateur & professional only wants to invest in a system, that has enough choice for the different needs and the know-how to do this.
Sony knows, that people will be suspicious to Sony cameras. To sell P&S and videogames is a different level than DSLRs. There will be many peope who say : Why shall I buy a sony DSLR, they have no market share and no "real" lens know-how and there do exist only non-digital optimized old KM lenses anyway and therefore there is no chance to survive for that system..."
So Sony will try to put this into perspective how they see it and they are partially right.
a) It is easier to convince owners of 16 million lenses to buy a DSLR which fits the mount, then to convince them to buy into a new lens-mount (Kyocera and Olympus ignored that point). Everybody knows that you need at the end of the day in most cases new lenses for a 10MP camera. But people still prefer first to buy the DLSR body and use it first with old lenses. Later on they buy more new lenses. And you keep all te costumers.
This was the case with all brands: Canon, Nikon etc. Sony would have never tried to enter the DSLR market without a cooperation with an established mount. The fact that Minolta just gave up, was IMHO nothing Sony knew one year ago when they signed the cooperation.
b) The "neighbor effect" as described above with the car (Olympus and Kyocera ignored that point)
c) Showing committment with a huge range of new lenses (Kyocera missed that totally with the N-System, Olympus catched up recently)
Sony will IMHO again and again try to give indications why they take this market entrance seriously and wants to stay in it forever. If they do not succeed to convince a bigger audience with this than Olympus and Kyocera, they will fail. IMHO they know that a DSLR with a great chip is not enough. Even if the sensor will be better than anything Canon has to offer, this will not be enough to gain significant marketshare. Canon sensors are good enough to stick with it. No reason for the masses to switch. And if new buyers have the choice between a new unknown Sony system and a well established Canon system that every second neighbour is using, they will not hesitate to buy Canon
So we can casually lay back and watch what else Sony is showing to seduce us. For us there is no reson to hurry as I and others stated many times in the past. We do have already working systems - either analogue or digital. And we have a very high image quality with our Contax system, which not every other user can say
I would recommend to treat it like a movie: Enjoy the play, watch closely all the actors and be curious about the end
Just my 2 cents...