Arrrg. I cannot escape this news, and now you can't either. Olympus sold its camera division off to a private equity firm.
The Internets are alight with theories and rambling conspiracy theories. I am going to help. I will not tell you the answer, but unlike everyone else I not only know the answer but will tell you how you can figure it out yourself.
Private Equity firms have web sites, on which they disclose their investments past and present. You can look up those investments and see how they have fared. It should not take you an hour to formulate a general picture of what kind of strategy this particular firm uses, and how successful they are at it. No two Private Equity firms are the same, so generalizations about how they just strip mine companies and discard the remains merely reveal you as a rube who reads too much Mother Jones.
This is the firm that's buying the Olympus camera division: JIP. An hour with google's translation and search services will tell you what is most likely to happen to Olympus camera.
Assuming you care, which I don't.
Olympus the camera co had some interesting and original camera designs, notably the OM-1 & 2, the XA, and the Stylus/Mju (of which I owned two Epics -- brilliant optics!). Maybe they were like the Apple of camera makers, design-wise (full disclosure: although I admire some aspects of Apples designs, I generally speaking despise Apple, for all sorts of reasons). Anyway, Olympus stopped making those models a long time ago, and haven't really produced anything nearly as good or innovative since, IMHO.
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