Sony broke the Canon/Nikon duopoly of professional, digital cameras. They put out a mid-level mirrorless camera and rode it out. Today, I see Sony kits everywhere like on sidelines, press pools, and studios. But I'm not a Sony investor, so maybe like you, there's not much personal interest beyond "Wow, they made a great business decision."

They did something really different actually: they put out a product that wasn’t ready and allowed the market to shape how it was used.

More or less the pure fantasy of digital cameras: a sensor in a box with a computer, screens and a lens mount. The nearest thing to no lock-in at all that doesn’t need to be mounted on another camera to work.

But the initial reviews of the first two NEX models were devastating because it was a very unfinished concept.

They had the sense to listen to complaints, implement decent focus-peaking as soon as possible, not to get too much in the way of people who were prepared to buy one to experiment with, and fix the product iteratively.

So now we have what even micro-four-thirds could not have achieved: larger and larger lens-mount-ambivalent capture boxes that don’t suck too badly.

They still IMO are not great sculpted finessed cameras, but somehow a couple of them have real charm.

The fact that the same brand is stuck to it as was stuck to digital media whose producer was so desperate to control its uses it would essentially commit crimes to do so, has always struck me as unusual.