[slr555]

There is a sales and marketing side to this story as well. Switching costs in photography are quite high if you are invested in a system. Changing systems means selling every lens you own at a greatly depreciated price and purchasing new equivalents at full price. Canon wanted the pro sports market and Nikon was deeply entrenched. 300mm, 400mm, and 600mm lenses that are der rigeur for the sports pro (plus a few others like the 70-200mm) are far more expensive than camera bodies. Canon heavily subsidized the switching costs for key influential pros to get the ball rolling. These incentives were strategically timed to coincide with some of the innovations mentioned in the article. Had they not primed the pump and switched all there big teles to putty gray the battle would have been much tougher.

As far as the Nikon vs Canon thing, I remember a Helmut Newton documentary where a tourist hands him an instamatic camera to take a picture of the tourist with the model. Newton obliges and they show the finished shot. Which looks exactly like a Helmut Newton. It's not the hardware....