Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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?"
The ironic thing is that Kodak pretty much invented digital photography long before it was practical to implement as a consumer product. They probably had the closest thing to genuinely inventive patents. Although it would have been a tragedy if they were able to set back the industry like Apple wants to.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Ya want to know how they could have REALLY kicked some digital ass? they should have worked on a digital camera that outputs film style pictures. and they could have cleaned up! What I mean by that is the warm tones that something like Kodachrome put out. folks still like that warmth and would be happy to give up some resolution if they had a camera that could crank out digital pictures that looked like they were taken on Kodachrome. Sure you can tweak it afterwards in Photoshop, but how many people have the skills to do it?
A camera where little Suzy the checkout girl could have all the convenience of digital with the softer warmer look of film would have frankly been a hit. Tie it in with a photoprinter that could crank the pics out and they could have backed up the money truck. But just like the *.A.A and piracy instead of adapting to the times and offering a better product they sat on their collective butts and let the world pass them by. Stupid move Kodak, really stupid.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The city itself now owns Midtown Plaza, but they plan to give portions of the land away to companies in exchange for moving downtown (cannibalizing the suburbs). IIRC, one of the local mall developers had owned the property before that and was more than a million dollars behind in tax payments, but the city chose to pay them $10 million for the building. The local mall developers are also active in local government (though I don't remember if this particular one was).
The mayor prior to this one didn't actually live in Rochester, he lives in Batavia but owns property in Rochester. During the development of one of the sports stadiums built during his term, he directed the stadium to be built on property he owned even though it wasn't the best overall fit for the stadium.
For the most part, the local newspaper turned a blind eye to the behind the scenes shenanigans since they were very loud avocates of both projects. Not to mention the Fast Ferry, which lost $60 or $80 million over the course of 3 years. The paper also withheld publishing the fact that the city council had been told the ferry was going to fail and was a waste of money. Alas, the paper is VERY beholden to the government and its executives often serve on local community advocacy type panels, further clouding its supposed independence. The local tv and radio news personnel have been gutted over the last decade, so they don't really have the manpower to do much actual investigating themselves.
The city government is controlled by one party and the county government by another. There's a lot of animosity between the two which trickles right down to the residents. You know the typical stereotypes... the reality of the situation doesn't matter. On top of that, the city desperately wants to merge with the county, effectively taking over the county government, so the city can bleed the county to fill the coffers that have long been drained at further expense to the suburbs. The whole thing is a giant mess, partisanship reigns supreme and all that matters is the dogma, because nothing else gets published in this area and few on either side bother hear the other side's dogma.
You could argue that, since George Eastman's suicide, the city has suffered the exact same fate his corporation has... and for largely the same reasons. Complete and utter mismanagement based on a total misunderstanding of what is happening on the ground, no ability to realistically plan for the long term and the desire for the brass to aggrandize themselves in the short term.
Stop Koolaid Politics