[tene]

They had no choice? Really?

Check out this archived post from when they took down their photo sharing site: https://web.archive.org/web/20180327235711/https://lytro.wuf...

If they actually wanted to build a popular product with significant longevity, they could have done FAR more to enable people to build on their file format etc.

This "they didn't want to pursue full vendor lock-in at every step of their company; they had no choice" apologism just doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.

More likely, they made a bid to capture a greater share of the value, at the cost of limiting the size of their market, and it predictably failed. Or maybe they were prioritizing some kind of acquisition, over building a company with real longevity.

I don't really know anything about the company besides a short skim through Google, but it just doesn't seem remotely plausible to me that they really truly wanted to make this accessible to more people and cultivate a larger market and ecosystem, but somehow had literally no choice in pursuing their vendor lock-in strategy.

They chose to bet on control over mindshare, and this had predictable consequences.

[olliej]

Nah what killed Lytro was that it was very expensive, while also being low resolution, while also not really offering a feature that people really wanted. People basically just want the multi focal plane stuff that modern phones do but cheaper and at higher resolution. I don’t think people have ever really demonstrated a desire to share images that could have the focal plane changed by the viewer, but even when you could with this format the functional number of planes was actually quite small.

Also the device itself looked nice, but it was fairly hard to use and the view finder screen was a fairly bad lcd even at the time.

The fact that they weren’t giving away decoders at the time is pretty much a given, especially given how much emphasis they put on the “algorithms” they used.