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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."
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.
while it's true that jumping on a bad fad could bankrupt you, only an idiot would have continued to believe that digital wasn't going to succeed. The prices for digital cameras was low enough that instamatics just couldn't compete, on original price alone. Granted, the early digital cameras pictures sucked in quality, but knowing the speed of new tech improving that was solely limited by manufacturing process would quickly let you guess about when the image quality would be close to film. Moore's law and all - it was only a couple of years after the initial 1-2 MP cameras came out that the 3 and 5 MPs came out, and 5MP was good enough for a pocket camera to rival the print of a cheap 35mm camera, and that's pretty much the beginning of the real end for film. Digital didn't add on the processing costs for film, you could take 100 pictures, "process" them on the spot, and take another 100, pretty much for "free". The best film could do was 1 hour processing at a relatively high cost, and 36 max pics per roll. (I can take over 1000 in RAW mode on my current DSLR and the way oversized Compact Flash card I have)
As for tablets, I think the market will continue to grow. There's a distinct use case for tablets, and it more than meets the needs for a large majority of the populace. Think all the current phone texters that make do with 140 characters or less thumb typing on a screen keyboard far too small for their fingers being able to enjoy much larger real estate of the tablet.
The real issue with the tablet "fad" is a bunch of companies that think throwing some hardware together in a roughly tablet sized package is sufficient keep failing, and they'll continue to fail. It's more than just hardware, if they want to even enter the edge of the iPad market.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.