Maybe the older customers are a factor. But selling telegraph machines is a dead end business. One has to think that people running these companies are smart enough to plan beyond the next 5 years.

And I don’t see Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc. saying "we are selling so many cameras why bother changing anything?". Because smartphones have decimated their industry’s low end over the last 15 years and even now DSLR and mirrorless cameras are hardly a growth industry. But they could be a growth industry if they drastically rethought their products instead of taking tentative baby steps to appease the boomers who buy their legacy products.

I doubt this is about laziness either because these cameras are indeed really, technically outstanding. They just all fall down when it comes to what modern customers expect from user interfaces and seamless connectivity… which inevitably makes many people say "screw it, ill just use my smartphone" even though they might have an interest in taking better pictures. Everything these companies have done trying to appease us has been a kluge… a half-assed attempt to put a band aid on the problem.

I think the fundamental problem, and this is a problem that you see across all late 20th Century consumer electronics makers (cameras, copiers, av equipment makers, TV makers etc) is that the old school leadership can’t see beyond the hardware driven industry they grew up in. Every single one of these CE companies has crappy user interfaces on the products.

And that’s not an accident. Whenever a company or industry fails to innovate you can be assured that there is likely a company culture issue. Because culture comes from the top and trickles down. If the upper level decision makers of these companies don;t make something a priority it will never happen, no matter how many young and eager ui designers they hire.