The company has built a worldwide community of users of its many different action cameras, and it is known for masterful marketing.
Those two facts formed the basis for initial optimism when word first emerged in late 2014 of the company’s plans to get into the drone market.
People had long been mounting GoPro cameras on other manufacturers’ drones, including early DJI models before the two companies began to face off as competitors rather than continue to work together as partners.
Not even counting the initial launch delays, the Karma drone faces two major hurdles to wide customer adoption. First, it lost valuable ground over the last two months to the Mavic Pro, which DJI unveiled just a week after the September launch of the Karma.
While DJI had its own problems fulfilling customers’ orders for the Mavic Pro, that drone, which is feature-rich and similarly priced to the Karma, has been a big hit.
Second, and perhaps more problematic, is that the Karma is well behind both the Mavic Pro and other DJI drones when it comes to features, as well as compared to other companies’ drones. The Mavic Pro is smaller than the Karma and has a rich suite of obstacle avoidance and follow-me features that the Karma can’t match.