You weren't expecting me to say Nikon responded, were you? No, as usual, my In Box and phone line continue to be devoid of any communication from Nikon itself. No, I meant your response to my short article (now on the 2009 Archive page). One response in particular got my attention, because it so perfectly describes the Nikon customer experience:
"A couple of years ago, I went to a high end microscopy course. The students were a mix of techs, postdocs and faculty so this was a crowd that either had purchasing authority or a large influence on people who had purchasing authority. The course was made possible by the microscope companies who brought millions of dollars worth of equipment to the course (a fully equipped laser scanning confocal microscope can hit a million dollars). The four companies represented were Zeiss, Leica, Olympus and Nikon. The Zeiss and Leica people were absolutely great.
They brought some very senior and very knowledgeable people. The Olympus people were young but very knowledgeable and when the really expensive stuff was being shown, they brought in their more experienced people. The Nikon people were pretty useless and when the really expensive stuff was being shown, they had even more junior people doing the presentations. Finally, when they were presenting the up and coming experimental stuff, Olympus and Zeiss showed impressive cutting edge stuff while Nikon showed some cheap almost useless equipment. I certainly came away thinking that I would never buy Nikon equipment. Luckily for Nikon, I had already bought my D80."
Now, the interesting thing is that I was traveling with someone recently who sold microscopes to this audience (and may well have been one of the ones presenting to this customer). What they told me corresponds with the above pretty well word for word.
So, Nikon, you have a systemic problem.