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The Rise and Fall of Kodak
H_Fisher writes "Michael Hiltzik of the L.A. Times writes with a frank look at the decisions and changes that have led to Kodak's decline from top U.S. photography company to a company whose product is almost irrelevant. He writes: '[Kodak] executives couldn't foresee a future in which film had no role in image capture at all, nor come to grips with the lower profit margins or faster competitive pace of high-tech industries.' He also notes that Kodak's story comes as a cautionary tale to giants like Google and Facebook."
I wrote an article about the impact of Kodak on Rochester, New York, the city it built. Some interesting context about how technology built a city - twice.
go get it
Companies already know what happens when you don't continue to innovate. The book:The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business goes into great detail and is basic reading at most business schools.
Kodaks whole business was founded on film development. The whole idea was that they sell the cameras cheap and charge for the development. Was that way going back to the glass plate days. Simply put, they where rendered irrelevant by digital photography which is the exact oposite market. Expensive cameras, free "film". While its sad to see them go, they are more or less a lost cause now.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
This site was one of the pioneers of tech blogs in the early days of the Internet. Then other tech blogs came, then fb commenting came and now twitter has made slashdot a total non-entity. In fact, the fact this site looks virtually the same and has no real new features in years shows how much the rest of the tech world has passed them by.
In short, Kodak = slashdot. May they both rest in peace.
They could have used their name to make digital cameras fly off the shelf, but they consistently built the crappiest brand name digital cameras I've seen. They should have embraced change, but their lackluster, half-assed adaptations flopped.
This story should also come as a cautionary tale to the recording industry!
more or less a lost cause now
I would say less. If they were able to cut their expenses to the bone, then take on additional funding to create innovative imaging products, then they would have a shot. Their brand recognition is still worth a lot. There are a lot of people over 30 who will have some trust in new Kodak products.
Unfortunately, they have tried to create products by copying the status quo. They should raid developers and designers from Apple and try a fresh start.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
The paper industry is feeling the pinch, too. Newspapers are dying, and paper mills are closing. The latest generation of computer users feels little desire to print anything. The paper industry had a "put it on paper" promotion. That seems to have disappeared.
Paper requires an infrastructure. In business, paper implies filing, filing cabinets, folders, record storage, file clerks, trash cans, shredders, staplers, paper clips, paper recycling, and other cost items. This not only increases cost, it increases head count and makes outsourcing and offshoring harder.
Printed forms are really expensive. Someone has to fill them out, they have to be moved around, sorted, and filed. and probably entered into into a computer at some point. It's been a long time since a forms manufacturer could advertise "the world is run on tracks of printed paper".
There are still many businesses with a lot of legacy paper, but the trend is down.
One big Kodak moment.
It's lesson for all businesses: adapt or become irrelevant. Look at IBM. They used to make tabulating machines. Now they make most of their money selling services. Some industries change at a glacial pace (e.g. oil, cement, Christmas trees) so companies entrenched here can take their time adapting to new realities whereas other industries change pace almost daily (e.g. fashion), so companies in these industries also need to adapt very quickly (e.g. Coach, LV, etc.).
'[Kodak] executives couldn't foresee a future in which film had no role in image capture at all, nor come to grips with the lower profit margins or faster competitive pace
Hmmmmm ... where have I seen that behavior before?
I want to say I enjoy slashdot as one of the few sites actually implementing a nice and full threaded discussion system. We aren't talking about obsolescence, but rather a preference. Too many discussion systems either reorder posts, support no or one level of reply, and other such silly limitations.
Aside from that, the quality of commentators tends to be higher. More often than not, someone related to or very keenly aware of the subject of a story chimes in with additional data whereas most other forums explode in a barrage of inane chatter, trolls and woefully misinformed people. Yes, slashdot is subjected to that as well *but* if we are grading on a curve here, slashdot's community comes out pretty good.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Kodak gave us the film roll, color slides, digital imaging and OLED
Facebook has so far given us a way to stalk our high school bullies
I wouldn't be shocked if a company like Pentax (who has good digital products but limited consumer name recognition) to buy the Kodak name for use in a new low end consumer product line.
But Kodak is still trying to cling to the film business. Their new products are things like a digital camera with a built in printer, sort of a hybrid version of their older instant cameras. People just dont seem interested.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I worked on a project with Kodak to do a project for a company that dealt with disposable camera's and photo galleries. It by itself was an amazing idea and very useful even now, however they we're horrible and the project failed horribly. The world has left them behind.
In a world where they had to do little more than free image galleries and the brand could have killed off a flicker years late, they continued to throw away everything they built.
I wonder what part 'photogs' (why can't they call themselves photographers? weird.) played in this.
You know the ones, that - even as recent as 2 years ago - still claimed digital was crap, film was here to stay as a vastly superior medium, that no professional would ever adopt digital, etc. etc. etc. The very same people Kodak probably had intimate relationships with from marketing through research.
Not laying blame, just saying.. perhaps Kodak laid too much importance on their opinions, trusting them to be 'right' as they had been for decades earlier.
I remember in University when I was studying Physics (around 1995), I used the very last glass plate we had for a double split experiment practicum paper I had to write. End of an era :-)
Kodak did make a move on inkjet printers with fairly priced ink.
When I was looking to replace my printer, I would have bought a Kodak printer. However, I use Ubuntu and Kodak didn't provide Linux drivers at the time. I'm not sure if anything has changed on this front since I last needed a printer.
They watched Polaroid whither and die, and then boldly marched down the same path.
And we are surprised?
Kodak should have been the ones to do Photoshop, but they left it for Adobe to do. Not unlike WordPerfect, who should have been the ones to do the word processor for Windows, but they left the field wide open and Microsoft filled the vacuum.
I guess the next thing we should expect is for Kodak management to raid the employee pension fund to try a last ditch effort to save the company on some misguided old school scheme.
Half a league, half a league, half a league onward.
Forward, into the valley of death, rode the six hundred....
I think Kodak has done incredibly well with their transition.
Demand for their primary product disappeared overnight - yet they are still around.
GM needed government support just to survive a decline.
The thing is, Kodak was a frontrunner in digital cameras. They build the first. They had the first DSLR 20 years ago (with funky shoulder-stray storage and power units, like the lasers in Akira).
They just pissed it away by the way of bad decisions.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I thought that was Poleroid. Anyway, people still print their digital pictures, but the paper has to be less than $5 a sheet...
Could they adapt? Sure, but that requires the company changing completely and going into a business they don't understand as well.
The issue is that a company that lived and breathed film is now in a world that doesn't use film. When there is some sort of paradigm shift in an industry, the old giants are set in their ways. Even if they have the resources to re-tool and get with the times, do they really have what it takes to stay relevant? And other than some nostalgia of a long known name disappearing, does it matter if new names take over as time goes by?
Better than most other home printer brands I've come across and the ink works out a lot cheaper too.
A few excerpts from Kodak develops: A film giant's self-reinvention (Feb 2010) seem to suggest they just couldn't transition fast enough rather than became irrelevant.
The usual explanation is that Kodak failed to see the approach of digital.
In fact, Kodak was more than ahead of its competitors: it invented the digital camera -- even though it lacked the foresight to exploit it.
Oddly enough, Kodak did adapt with the time in certain industries. Their presence in the printing industry (which is also dying...) is very large. They provide the de facto standard for soft proofing with their Insite product. Unfortunately, my experience with their responsiveness when it comes to fixing bugs in their software and/or adding requested features has been very negative. For one issue that I am currently experiencing is actually addressed already, but they are waiting till their next software release which is scheduled for late first quarter. So ya, I get frustrated when I'm told, we have a fix for that but you can't have it......
Remember the Quicktake?
No, they didn't make the first DSLR 20 years ago. What they did was basically sell an add-on that attached to your Nikon SLR to make it digital. Kodak never made any DSLRs themselves; they were always digital backs, or based on Canon or Nikon bodies, or sometimes just rebranded Canons or Nikons.
There's a huge market for camera components. Film is dead (at least for stills, film is slowly moving that way), but the DSLR market is alive and well, and companies like Sony are making a fortune selling camera modules to go into the iPhone and other devices.
Kodak could have been selling millions of mobile camera modules, or competing with Nikon and Canon for the high-end, but they're not.
And ironically Kodaks business plan of sell the camera for cost and over charge for the film is alive and well in the printer/ink business.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I'm talking about the specific observations made by Clayton Christensen about how some innovation "helps create a new market ... and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market ... displacing an earlier technology there" [wiki disruptive technology]. It's really classic and it's not about adapting or becoming irrelevant. Companies find it almost impossible to disrupt themselves because usually when the innovation comes along it's not capable of serving an existing company's customers. Over time, with a trajectory of improvement, the innovation meets mainstream needs and displaces the incumbent (vacuum tubes/transistors, mainframes/minicomputers, chemical photography/digital photography and so on). Clayton's book The Innovator's Dilemma is probably the best read on this topic.
After Sculley left Apple he did some consulting for them. Didn't they listen to him or....... maybe they did:)
The big difference was Kodak produced the medium and not the content.
If they were smart, they would have been buying the copyright on every photograph they could get their hands on
and not just sold film.
I lived for many years in the UK town where Kodak had its European headquarters and plant - Hemel Hempstead. It's all gone now. Even the town only "skyscraper" which was Kodak offices has been converted to residential use. Makes me wonder where all those thousands of employees are working now.
Predicting the future is hard. Look at that scene in "The Man Who Fell To Earth" where Newton invents an instant camera. Instant is something anyone could see would be a winner, but no-one at that time saw it happening without using film.
I find it interesting that the Kodak name plus their patent portfolio, only nets a $300M market cap. They must have a lot of liabilities to drag them down that low.
The cautionary tale that was taught in the '70s was the demise of the railroads.
I don't think so.
The problem for Kodak is that photography is more and more stratifying itself into two major categories:
1. High-quality digital camers
2. Cell phone cameras
Kodak built its business on cheap cameras that anyone could afford, and, of course, the film. Cell phones are now increasingly replacing Kodak's old niche in the photography world, and they've never really been known for expensive high-quality equipment. Going electronic & digital was simply not enough, they would need to break into an entirely new market or product type to stay alive.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Jerry Kaplan
Kodak provided a good product, and it innovated both in the pro and consumer market. The stuff it did really brought photography to the masses, and high end photography to the pros. The cameras allowed us to take pictures. The film allowed us to accurately reproduce those pictures. The technology was not trivial.
The think is that it is simply not cost effective to do a good job printing pictures that can just be reprinted. Archival for the family is no longer an issue. So the quality that Kodak represented is no longer needed. Which means lower markup and therefore an inability to pay for the bloated management that all corporation build up over time. This is why we need firms to go under, fire all the management, and sell all the assets. It frees up managers that are good to start more efficient ventures, and allows inefficient managers to no longer be a drag on the system. With the current idea that corporations are imortal, we have manager vampires feeding off the workers and consumers without providing any real value.
So is there a lesson here. Yes, to the inefficient manager, be ready to be thrown out into the street. Which won't happen, as there will always be banks and courts that perpetuate the efficiency of aristocratic class. Kodak can go. They represent and inefficient past. Not buggy inefficient, but perhaps heating stove inefficient.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
They are kind of like cameras, they just usually print really boring photos.
As noted, Kodak has always been at the forefront of Digital photographic technology - this article seems to paint a picture of a company which has taken its foot off the accelerator, as opposed to a much more typical scenario of the company that DEVELOPS the technology almost never being the one which successfully EXPLOITS it.
20 years ago Kodak invented the Photo-CD - ahead of its time in many ways, it basically flopped as the mass market was not really technically prepared to be able to use the format - it ended up gaining at least a fair level of acceptance among professional photographers...
in 1975 the first digital camera was built using then-new CCD image sensor technology at Kodak Eastman by engineer Steven Sasson - a decade later Kodak scientists developed the world's first MegaPixel sensor, capable of producing a photo-quality 5x7" print, in 1986...
the first camera to use Compact-Flash - a format still popular today - was the Kodak DC-25 in 1996...
in 2000 Kodak teamed up with Qualcomm to develop the core technologies for the creation of high-quality digital cinema systems - to give credit where it is due, Sony has largely been the driving force behind digital cinema for the last ten years...
in 2001 Kodak introduced the EasyShare digital camera and (in 2003) printer dock, allowing many households to finally enter the Digital age Kodak had promised a decade earlier with the Photo-CD - solid-state storage technology such as Compact-Flash by now basically replacing the CD as the preferred medium...
it also launched the first Digital Photo Frame around the same time - the "Smart Frame" licensed to Kodak by Weave Innovations, it could download images from Weave's online Story Box network, or you could load images onto it via Compact-Flash...
in 2005 Kodak launched the EasyShare Photo Printer 500, for use with virtually any brand of digital camera and recently introduced camera phones, and in 2006 it entered into partnership with Motorola for purposes of global cross-licensing and marketing around mobile imaging products - in 2007 it had a similar arrangement with Sony-Ericsson and in 2008 introduced the world's first 1.4micron 5 Megapixel sensor - developed specifically for mobile phones...
I think it is a mistake to categorise Kodak as a company which "couldn't foresee a future in which film had no role in image capture" or, as an early adopter of internet and online distribution one that is "dependent on outdated distribution technologies" and while it is true that "consumer demand for Kodak's traditional products has evaporated" it is also equally true that Kodak has expanded its interests far beyond those traditional products - from printing and long-lasting dye technologies, to photo frames and the development and patenting of OLED technology, through to the "Easyshare" philosophy of connecting cameras and phones and printers and even those frames to wirelessly share your digital photos - even to being involved in the Mars Rover project and developing CCD technology for Space - this is a company which may not be pulling in the major profits of days gone by, but it is NOT from a lack of foresight!
Except it's HP that has the corner on that business model.
They had an angle into that market; they made CCD's for high-end digital SLR's for a long time. I know they sold sensors to Olympus, among others, for years. Olympus wound up switching to Panasonic as a sensor supplier for technical reasons related to video capture, but lots of folks still swear by the old Kodak sensor cameras.
Pentax was bought by Ricoh, so that Ricoh would have a brand with better name recognition!
I worked as a designer for a market research firm in the late 1990s and Kodak (a client) was then trying to come up with ways to remain relevant. They were always testing new concepts and business models. Not products per se, but entire new ways of looking at imaging and how consumers would use cameras and images in the future. I guess they never found a solution.
They did that -- they made CCD's for several DSLR's for a long while. Olympus got their sensors from Kodak for their DSLR's for years, and they also made some very high-end medium format sensors for Hasselblads and so on. Not sure why they wound up failing in this market, really; Olympus left them because they wanted a partnership with Panasonic for other reasons, not because there was anything fundamentally wrong with the images from the Kodak sensors.
How's Lexmark doing in that corner of the business world these days?
Kodak may have a fighting chance in an "expensive camera, free film" market. Unfortunately for Kodak, it's becoming a free camera, nonexistent film market. The article argues Kodak's problem is worse than the auto or entertainment industries because their core products are still in demand, they just need to adapt.
Even in hindsight, I'm not sure what they could have done other than using their capital to move into another industry. Digital cameras and picture frames, printers, printing services... they had relative success with many of those technologies and it didn't help. I agree with you, sadly, Kodak is a lost cause.
Kodak introduced it's first high-end (ok, that was the only end there was) digital camera in 1991, more than 20 years ago, so I think it's fair to say they should have seen this coming.
If you can't get the ship turned around given 20 years of pretty clear notice then I don't really feel the need to get all sniffly and sad over their passage.
G.
For many years Kodak also produced a lot of the film used in x-rays. When a small hospital is producing over 100 chest x-rays a day (on a piece of film that is 35 by 43), that's a LOT of film. The chest x-ray is probably *the* most common film taken (simply because you can tell a lot about the state of a patient's heart and lungs very quickly, at very little cost in terms of money or radiation). It's a big sheet of film - funnily enough about the size of your chest. They made a lot of money with it.
Then digital technology arrived, and Kodak did adapt - producing both CR and DR equipment, printers, and PACS archives. They even won a very large contract with the NHS in Britain to supply many of the hospitals with their radiography equipment.
Quite what happened then I don't know but they got out of medical imaging, but they did at least attempt to adapt to the new scene. Perhaps their financial models revolved too much around the silver they were putting on the old films.
Right, but at that point they should have been making their own cameras instead of just the sensor. They had a lock on the entire camera market at one point, but for some reason it seems that they never actually made their own digital cameras, just rebranded or added on to other companies'.
The make-your-own-camera-module thing became more important as cellphones started getting cameras integrated (even when they were crap, a lot of phones had them, and there was money there even then). It wasn't (and isn't) realistic for Kodak to have made their own cellphone, but they could have gotten a chunk of the camera module market. At this point, that's probably even a much bigger market than the rest of the camera market combined; every cellphone, tablet, handheld game console sold, they all have camera modules, and Kodak isn't the one making them. Sony makes a lot of them, even for their competitors. And I've no idea who makes the camera modules in the 3DS, but it's got *THREE* of the things. More and more cellphones these days have at least two cameras...
I worked for a digital imaging reseller back in the early '90s. We were a Kodak agent and sold the Kodak DCS series of camera and the LEAF camera backs. The Kodaks used a standard Nikon SLR camera body. There were options for an infra-red and aerial photography filmbacks. They were fairly advanced when you think about it.
They released a DCS with burst capture and voice annotations for the '92 Olympics for sports photographers.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
They may have adapted but management at Kodak was terrible.
We used their workflow (Prinergy) at our print company. Then there was the global recession, our sales were down too, so we were looking to save money and Prinergy was costing us big bucks. When things picked up, their major competitors Agfa had a major upgrade ready to their Apogee system and Prinergy was dead, put into maintenance. We cancelled out maintenance contract, why are we paying for Prinergy if Kodak aren't developing it further.
Kodak management had decided to heavily cut employees during the recession, I read that team had gone from 200 to 10! Agfa had expanded and produced a new version, a real looker too, all animated and friendly. The rep from Agfa told me they'd hired hundreds of talented programmers during the recession while they were cheap and available, and expanded the team to get ahead of the competitors.
Kodak management simply made a bad choice.
http://www.prepresspilgrim.com/index.php/archive/prinergy-is-dead/
At the level forests are declining around the world (one word - oxygen), i say good riddance to paper industry. There is no need to even comment on the fact that digitization has made paper almost obsolete (except for legal documents/contracts). Since the digital medium provides me much better usability for getting any kind of information (ranging from news to statistics, and recently even books), i dont think i will be looking back at any point.
Read radical news here
How's Lexmark doing in that corner of the business world these days?
Having had several at my company, I can say their printers are garbage.
I don't know, but it works for me.
that's why they are losing so much money lately.
And ironically Kodaks business plan of sell the camera for cost and over charge for the film is alive and well in the printer/ink business.
For now... printing is already on the decline. It's probably not going to drop off quite the way film has, but there are already a lot of things that people used to print that they now just carry around on smartphones, or display on cheap LCD screens. The printer/ink business model will survive a while longer, but it's going to get steadily less profitable as people use ink at slower rates.
The VP of research at EK told us a story that back in the 1970's, Kodak had a billion dollars in the bank to invent. They had to choose between instant photography and digital imaging.
Kodak chose instant photography. I think they ended up spending another billions dollars on lawyers and on a settlement with Polaroid. In the meanwhile, Kodak cancelled a large part of its digital imaging program, after already bringing the world's first consumer camcorder to market.
The box says Ektar.
All your database are belong to U.S.
Everyone else is stupid enough to think digital storage (optical or magnetic) has the same long life as paper and film. Guess what... after 200 years all your data may be gone.
I dealt with Kodak at a senior level during he late 1990's and early 2000's.
I was staggered by how incompetent the senior management was. They had no plan, no vision and no ability to make any change.
I remember one time I visited Kodak, they had come up with a new business plan. The plan was that they would make a fortune from the LA film industry selling, developing and printing 70mm and 35mm film. Problem was: they were already doing that. But this was the last piece of the business that was profitable. The rest was in decline.
Kodak had every opportunity to lead the migration to digital, but they left that to HP, Canon and competitive camera makers. Pentax, Canon, Fuji, Nikon, Richo all made the transition. Kodak ended up with nothing.
They could have led the digital camera and printing market without much effort at all. They already had the brand, the channel and the industry contacts - all they needed was the technology.
A real shame. A great company driven to destruction by incompetent management.
In 2007 (screened 2008), Gene Simmons gave Kodak the best slogan ever on Celebrity Apprentice USA: It's a Kodak World.
Wikilink to episode
Kodak disagreed, Gene lost, held his ground, could have saved himself but didn't and went out in a blaze of glory.
Best vid I could find, correct episode, Gene isn't shown
If Kodak were larger and more influential i'm sure they would be lobbying hard to get digital media banned so they could continue with their obsolete business model of producing film...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
People who made stuff for the horse industry could find new employment in the car industry. People who worked at Kodak have no such replacement. The replacement for film camera's comes from the east and I am not talking about California. Sony for instance makes a LOT of the cheap cheerfull camera's that once used Kodak film. Those are made in Japan. Not the US. Jobs for Japanese, not Americans.
You might look down on a job at a film development line but it gave a lot of people the income to lead their lives. And now their jobs are gone. Read up for how societies are affected when an industry leaves for one reason or another and is not replaced. Rochester, Detroit. These are not happy stories.
This is not about brand names, this is about the erosion of full-time, life-time employment being replaced by temporary work at minimum wages for less then full weeks.
And that matters.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... MPAA, RIAA, MAFIAA, etc
Kodak also manufactures many of the high-end sensors in medium-format digital backs. The Hasselblad H4D-40 and the Pentax 645D use the Kodak KAF-40000 sensor.
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Not only did they make CCDs for high-end digital SLRs, but they sold high-end digital SLRs in partnership with Nikon and Canon early in the switch to digital cameras in the 1990s. Kodak was a genuine innovator, and for a while these Kodak/Nikon cameras were THE camera that journalists used world-wide. The cameras weren't cheap ($10k+), but they were the first cameras that could legitimately be called a replacement for film, rather than the simple cameras with pathetic 640x480 resolution that were available for general consumer use for a few hundreds of dollars. These "professional" models were cameras that had high resolution (thousands of pixels by thousands of pixels), a camera with good optics, and battery life that lasted a day of shooting. They were bulky but functional. This was in the days when it was a novelty to shoot digital, upload the photo to a wire service via satellite, and have the photo sitting in the newsroom within hours of an event in a remote location somewhere in the world rather than days later via film. Now it's routine. It was obvious that as the technology improved and prices came down into the range that ordinary people could afford, this was the way things would eventually go.
The point is, Kodak wasn't backwards. They were THERE at the forefront of digital photography, they should have been very aware of what was coming, and they blew it. The camera manufacturers basically outsourced their CCD manufacturing elsewhere and then it was game over.
They care about how to share it. But there's only so many ways you can click and post to twitter/fb aren't there?
Kodak's main thrust was overall image quality and print quality, but look what has happened. People use crappy cell phone cameras for most things and hardly print anything.
Telling example of arrogant thinking: When the disc film camera system was introduced, there was a big presentation in the Kodak auditorium explaining in gory detail why it was so wonderful. The lens was a miracle of optical engineering. It was an impressive display of whiz-bang charts and 3D graphs of the photographic space etc. Only problem was you could not take a good photo with a disc camera; all the pictures were uniformly mediocre. Kodak took years to develop the disc system and Fuji had a copy-cat camera for sale in 6 months. This from the company that invented video tape recording and decided "Nobody would want a VCR in their home." Similar logic was applied to ink-jet and thermal printing and to a lesser extent to image sensor micro-lens arrays.
More recently, Kodak tried to sell image sensors into the cell phone market. Have any of you tried to sell anything to a cell phone company? We thought they would be impressed with the Kodak name, image quality and our proprietary image processing algorithms. They are so big they didn't care. Pricing is brutal. They want millions of parts on time or else! VGA devices are so cheap you can't make a profit. HD devices are low-volume so you can't make a profit. That leaves the middle ground of...nothing! We were earnest and naive.
Ranting against the dumbness of big business is popular and there is certainly blame to be placed on a management that could not see into the future, relied on a high-profit fading technology and approved only boring products. I have no doubt that all the fantastically wealthy managers that have driven this once proud company into the ground will enjoy their retirement. The technical people I worked with were GREAT!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
This scenario repeats often in tech business. See the book "Computer Wars" by Charles Ferguson. The tough problem is that to reinvent itself, the company needs all new people. The founders, the board, the management, the engineers all need to fire themselves. Think of a future where Google or Apple needed to reinvent themselves as (horrors) a hydro fracking company. Probably none of their employees or facilities would be suitable to the new business.
GE is perhaps the most famous exception to the rule. In the 60s their main business was making heavy metal objects, and their cash cow was light bulbs. Then GE became an entertainment company (NBC) and a financial company (GE Credit). Those are really fundamental changes and GE did it successfully. Hats off to them.
If a company can not radically reinvent itself, the logical step would be to voluntarily liquidate and return the proceeds to stockholders so that they can invest in new companies. I can't recall ever hearing of that being done, except by family owned businesses. Unless management are also the major stockholders, they can't be brave enough to fire themselves.
A lot of people have argued that Kodak laked the foresight to go digital. I do not believe this is true. I remember when I worked in printing reading a Kodak paper about 1990 which predicted the rise of the digital camera, and how it would replace the snapshot first, as those users would compromise quality for getting to see their pictures quicker (us older folks rember taking a year or so to use a 36-exposure reel of film). The top end where people used traditional equipment, and wanted high resolution and a long exposure range with latitude for over- and under-exposure would hold out longest, but the end of film would come sometime in 2010-2015. It was not clear how the motion picture market would go because there were no digital projectors back then, but the early TI research was beginning to show the way.
Kodak knew what was coming. They tried to move to digital. They made the first digital cameras. They make the first 1k by 1k area detectors. However, in the end, they were a film company, and despite having plenty of money and clever people back then (and probably now, too), you can't just become an innovator in a new field because your manager tells you to. Plus, there must be a certain squeamishness about gouging your own market while film is actually filling your pay-packet. Heigh-ho - it was never really likely to end any other way...
And what if she had seen those glories fade, Those titles vanish, and that strength decay; Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid When her long life hath reached its final day: Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade Of that which once was great is passed away. (Wordsworth)
Chemical film photography used to cost $1 (1990) per 4x6 print, you could horse it around as low as $0.30 if you really tried, but just going to the corner drugstore for film and developing worked out to $1 per 24 square inch print for a very long time.
I just bought a couple of 24" 1080p monitors for $150 each. That's 246 square inches (about 10 4x6 prints) for $150, infinitely "re-printable" and luminous. We currently take about 2000 digital photos a year (on our $200 camera), obviously we couldn't afford that on chemical film, but the cost per square inch of print is vanishingly small, especially when you mail copies to relatives and friends all over the world for virtually free.
Of course, my Great Depression raised Grandmother won't leave a digital photo frame switched on because it is "burning up electricity (which costs money)", but she will leave the wall-wart plugged in.
There goes another argument against breaking up monopolies.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Why are there these recurring articles about Kodak being doomed? Sure, I get that they were the 800 pound gorilla of photography for 40 years. Sure, that's changed dramatically, but they're far from doomed.
Kodak makes digital cameras, scanners, printers, document imaging systems, digital signs, motion picture industry products and more. They are all viable products to life expectancies long into the future. Kodak may no longer dominate the consumer space for imaging and may well shrink in size and earnings, but it's still a strong and viable company.
I don't think they are going away.
High taxes can be used for better education, so people get that high taxes doesn't have to be evil, and can help build a better world for all.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
"...couldn't foresee a future in which film had no role in image capture at all"
Badum chhhhhh
I have in the past worked for Kadak and my parents have retired from there. We have had many discussions over the years about how shortsighted the executive decisions have been...Kodak should not have been seen (by the execs) as a "photography company", but a coating, chemical and research company. They are experts in chemical coating and would do well in many new area including photocell sheet manufacturing and new methods for lithium ion battery production (nanocarbon sheets). They could have made themselves relevent for another 100 years if they could just see outside the box.
Interesting, I wonder if my 2001 Olympus Camedia C-3040Z has a Kodak sensor. It still takes great pictures and has image quality that revealed modern entry level 5MP cameras that were released years after it (despite being only 3.3MP). No rolling shutter either since its CCD and not CMOS.
If i remember right Leica M9 uses kodak sensor and it is one of the best digital cameras
Really it is this idea that a firm should be forever, and all the effort to make it happen, that creates inefficiencies in the free market.
Here, here. Of course, if there's a lot of government interference to this end, it's not really a free market.
When a company goes out of business, as others have noted, it's not like they shoot the employees and dynamite the equipment - all of that capability goes to competitors who are doing things differently (absent bailouts) and can be used more effectively. I am sad to see such a scion of my childhood near death, business-wise, but change like this is part of life, and when we block change, we get the stagnation we're in right now. Both sides of the political aisle fight this kind of change.
Just for fun, here's a Wikipedia list of the world's oldest companies. Zildjan (the drum folks) are really old.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Or about the value of a small sd-card of mp3.
Now I don't get it... Google and Facebook are about your "digital life". Kodak is/was about the "analog" life. So when the digital life is over, we will all be cavemen (physical/analog entities). Sounds interesting but I don't hope this will happen soon.
But Kodak is still trying to cling to the film business
Modern color negative film is amazing. Digital can't capture that dynamic range. I still shoot a lot of 120 - mostly transparency film and B&W, but also negative when I need the dynamic range.
Are you familiar with the limitations of Bayer interpolation? Sensor noise?
What else did people buy from Kodak then film. In general their cameras were crap (well I have a old Retina III that took good pictures...). In general they were late to the market. I never tried one of their printers, but that is an example of being too late. They have/had a bunch of fine scientists and engineers too. I guess they needed a visionary like Steve Jobs.
I did a project for Kodak in the mid-80s to produce a device that could be inserted between a pre-press artwork system and its expensive color calibrated monitor. The device was a dedicated computer (called the Preview) that captured the image and could transmit it over leased lines to another Preview where it could be reviewed on an expensive Barco monitor. Prior to this you had to print review copies and ship them. It was a clever idea and maybe not a huge opportunity by itself but certainly a foot in the door and a chance to pursue an area that was not tied to the photo business. When visiting Kodak, the electronic imaging group had an awesome Kodak photocopier that could collate and bind. Where's that business now? Kodak could have leveraged their name to become an imaging company. The products above would have fit into an imaging company which addressed a wide variety of needs. The company I worked for also produced computers running 386/ix from Interactive Systems Corporation. They were the first vendor of UNIX outside AT&T. Kodak purchased them and over the course of a few years, destroyed it by selling off the pieces. They have had non-photo business opportunities long enough ago where they could have been other lines of business. I don't have any insight except that for whatever reason, they just didn't do well with them. I suspect it was a matter of self-delusion and not broadening their product and customer base.
One thing missing here is that film technology is not irrelevant for preservation and access. (Compare with mass-consumer use it is irrelevant.)
Having worked in a capture/microfilming business for years I learned some simple things about film that are ignored. First that the technology for analog capture produces preservation images that cannot be duplicated using digital equipment. If you really want the look and feel of an original image you cannot beat having an image that can be re-sized almost infinitely through analog capture.
Second film as a preservation technology is durable. Light up a role of preservation film (seriously set it on fire) and if tightly rolled it will only melt the edges. When it cools off you can clean the film and still see the original images. Polyester can warp and melt but good quality film lasts.
Third you can always get back to the original – with some light and a lens you can project it anywhere. Has anyone tried to recover images from aging or destroyed media?
There are chemical hazard down-sides to the whole business and certainly there are specialty tools for capturing images, but film as a whole still has a place in technology.
"technology for analog capture produces preservation images that cannot be duplicated using digital equipment. If you really want the look and feel of an original image you cannot beat having an image that can be re-sized almost infinitely through analog capture"
Must be nice to live in a fantasy world where film grain is irrelevant.
Pentax doesn't have the clout (sadly). Hoya just sold them to Rioch.
Doh! Ricoh even.
I talked to an ironworker from out there who built one of their buildings. Actually they were only on the job for 1 week. I can't remember the specifics but basically lawyers, unions, and class action lawsuits were involved. Every single one of the people on the job during that week still to this day gets a check of ~$5000/month. That was in the 80s. That's the problem with most companies today. They have to pay for bullshit like the above instead of running a business. And that asshole union ironworker bragged about it.
They've taken to ruining songs (like 'Give me everything' by Pitbull, Ne-yo, Afrojack and Nayer) by inserting lyrical product placement
Slashdot, you are on notice. This article is about you.
No, they didn't make the first DSLR 20 years ago.
Correct, it was 35 years ago... here's the patent
They failed to innovate, protected their existing business over entering new fields. Only a few companies have been able to outgrow their initial success, even fewer by directly competing against their established product.
IBM is the number one example of a company that has morphed into something new several times over it's long history.
Apple seems to be trying, not sure if they'll succeed.
Nokia has done it in the past.
There's probably a few more examples.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Having had the opportunity to work with a good deal of former Kodak employs in the Rochester area, they've provided some insight into the devolution of Kodak beyond the idea that digital cameras are what killed them. The irony is that while the downward spiral did start because of digital photography, it wasn't because digital photography did not require film. While Kodak was built on the camera and selling film, over the years they evolved into something much more than a camera and film manufacturer. The became a materials processing company. From what I was told, Kodak had their hands in lots of areas of material processing, from developing plastics and polymers, to even having material processing facilities to process large quantities of materials for use by other companies. Apparently Kodak even made bombs at one point. Their height was as a material processing, and making film was just a small offshoot of that. But being as material processing isn't consumer facing, and film is, everyone is under the assumption that they just made film. At some point after the digital camera had risen and the bottom of the film market fell out, one of the new CEOs decided the direction the company should go was in selling mid-level digital photography equipment. I think we're all aware of the crappy Kodak digitial cameras they made that were good enough for your kids but not for anyone serious. What a terrible idea, I mean who ever WANTED one of those cameras? But I digress. When this decision was made, the focus of the company was no longer material processing, thus turning their back on their main source of non-consumer-facing business. What followed was more people getting laid off and them selling off a lot of their material processing branches with the entire company slipping a little further into the shitter.
That patent describes putting together a few existing components with no particularly original innovation, it does not appear to be a description of Kodak manufacturing and selling a DSLR camera (which I'd argue "make the first DSLR" would entail). Heck, the patent would seem to be invalid due to prior art, although at least some of the prior art may have been classified.
Kodak didn't invent the CCD (That was AT&T in 1969), they didn't first use it for imaging (That was also AT&T, 1971), they didn't first use it for capturing an actual picture (that was Fairchild in 1974 led by future failed Apple CEO Gil Amelio), and the use of CCD digital cameras predates their patent (U.S. NRO recon satellite, 1976). By the time their 1978 patent came around (which didn't result in any actual camera product), it had all been done before.
What exactly is the advantage of DSLRs? In film cameras, SLRs allow the photographer to see exactly what the film frame would through the view finder. In ANY digital camera with a screen, the user sees exactly what the CCD does, so what does the added complexity of the SLR mechanism add to digital cameras?
My subject is largely my comment. Their KAF 8300C/M (color or monochrome) is one of the best CCD sensors available for consumer (prosumer) astrophotography. that is all
Well, Kodak didn't make any digital cameras of any kind themselves, so far as I can tell, but if you're asking in a general sense, I don't think EVFs (electronic viewfinders) are sufficiently advanced to completely replace DSLRs.
Sony's latest cameras like the SLT-A55 are technically not DSLRs, as they eschew the optical viewfinder for an EVF, but they have some shortcomings... I'm not an expert, but I'll do my best to explain.
In terms of "why viewfinder in general", that one is easy; LCD panels like you'd find on a point & shoot are useless outdoors. This is starting to change (mostly driven by smartphone development), but there's still an enormous loss of fidelity even if you can tell what the screen is showing; the image on the screen, under bright sunlight, looks nothing like what the camera will capture. There's also probably various other issues about the relative amount of your vision the image takes up when looking through a viewfinder versus at an LCD panel on the back of a camera. Certainly nobody has ever made a camera with a rear LCD sufficiently high res to properly manually focus, although that's not a technology limitation (probably a cost issue).
In terms of why optical viewfinders rather than electronic (as in, why not just use the sensor), there are a few answers. For one thing, higher end cameras don't use the sensor image for autofocus, so they need to redirect light to the autofocus sensors anyhow, and at that point you've done most of the work for implementing a DSLR anyhow. There are cameras out there that use EVFs (electronic viewfinders), but without dedicated autofocus sensors, and their autofocus performance isn't even remotely as good (or as fast), since it can only do contrast-based AF and not phase-based AF. The other answer is that EVF technology just wasn't there yet. EVFs were invariably laggy (the image you see was lagging behind), and too low-res to let the photographer accurately manually focus. EVFs have improved a lot, but the Sony SLT-A55 is the first camera that manages to get around these issues. I mention the A55 not as some sort of advertisement for Sony (I prefer Canon cameras myself), but because they're legitimately the first company to actually pull it off. But the fact that the latest camera in that lineup is the very first one to pull it off kind of goes to show how new the technology to affordably pull it off is. Basically, the A55 uses the image from the sensor for the EVF, and a translucent mirror to simultaneously direct 30% of the light towards the autofocus sensors. You'll notice, though, that the A55 looks like a DSLR even though it's not; that's because the mechanics are similar, even if the viewfinder isn't optical.
So, the A55 is, I believe, the first camera to get perceptibly zero latency on the EVF, still have a dedicated autofocus array, and sufficiently high resolution on the EVF for manually focusing (although it's still not at the level where it's indistinguishable from reality). But there are limitations too. For one thing, the transparent mirror that redirects 30% of the light to the autofocus array is permanently in place. Your sensor will always get 70% less light than a comparable DSLR, and there are obviously consequences to that. For another thing, it's not quite perfect yet; there's no lag in the image on the EVF, but there's a big lag about it detecting if you're looking through the EVF, switching on the display (IIRC reviews pegged it at half a second or a second or so, enough to be annoying). And also, Sony probably has patents on the transparent mirror thing, which could impede other companies from doing the same thing.
In the end, the technical challenges about replacing an optical viewfinder with an electronic one make it a much harder challenge than you seem to think, and most camera companies obviously don't think it's yet worth the effort. It's certainly much harder to make than a DSLR. I think we'll slowly see more cameras moving in that direction, but it's only just becoming possible to do so.
This article was too kind to Fisher and Carp. Yes, they did embrace digital, but were totally inept at executing anything to do with it. I worked at Kodak in those days and Fisher and Carp were very hated men. All they did was pit once race/sexual orientated employee against another and really cared less about innovation. Fisher was under the crazy assumption he could fix things like he did at Motorola, and if memory serves me, that guy was partly to blame for free trade that has left most of us jobless today.
Fisher even tried to build plants in China to manufacture cheaper film that never opened because film went obsolete long before construction was completed.
The new CEO, is just a brick. He is the closer, has no intentions on turning things around, the fix is in. I owe my education to Kodak but they deserve everything they have coming to them.
I still know people that work at Kodak, and their idea of innovation is some sort of picture/Kodak iphone app, go figure...