Friday rant: The future of Canon RF and 3rd party lenses

JoWinter wrote:

At the risk of sounding dramatic, if it came down to a choice of only having Canon brand lenses available for my camera or not having Canon cameras available to buy, obviously I'd choose the former. To put it another way, if the camera division doesn't make enough money, it will go away. If blocking third party AF lenses is what it takes, that is an acceptable price, to me.

I hope not, but perhaps this is really where we stand at this point.

It's a valid point. But there's a flip side of that coin. Would Canon prefer to:

A) Sell you a body and a lens or two, while you also buy third party lenses. Or...

B) Lose customers to brand X, thus selling them nothing.

All the brands have thrived with third party lenses before. I don't think any of the camera makes that have gone under in the last 20 years have cited lack of sales due to third party glass for their demise.

Just my opinion, but 3rd party glass is a big part of the game now. Figure out a way to embrace it. Counter it by building better glass than the 3rd parties do (which Canon did for most of the EF era). There's always customers who will pay more for better native brand lenses.

Just the shear number of threads on this topic shows it's polarizing enough that Canon needs to address it better than they have.

There's plenty of shooters using Sony because of the lens choices.  And a large number were former Canon shooters.  Opening up the ecosystem would probably draw many of them back.