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."
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Hind sight is 20/20. There are also companies that died because they adopted a new fad technology. And lost too much money that they went out of business and should have stuck with their old model.
For example Saturn cars (yes it was oned by GM) but they got popular on the small car with little frills. Then when gas prices were at a low they jumped ship and started making SUV and sport cars. And hitting the quality on their small car line.
Gas prices rose. Saturn lost because it didn't have cars the people wanted.
Jump on the wrong fad you get hurt too. It is easy to mock Kodak but the digital camera faze may have ended with some software just not easy enough to share photos. Or broad band was just too expensive for the market. Or color printers prices remained high price and offered infeaor pictures.
Will the iPad and touch tablets stay popular. Or will windows 8 on multitouch laptops take the cheese.
A lot of companies are investing in getting the newest tablet to trump apples IPad, but what if tablets just reach their peak the holiday season then die down?
Do we skoff at the people who blindly jumped on the tablet fad? Even though right now it seems the hot new tech?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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...
IBM's market cap has bounced back. Surprisingly they're worth more than Microsoft again. Companies to look at for "Failure to adapt" might include RIM, Nokia, HP.
And Microsoft. They've been running on the same two products since their heyday. Their only real innovation (a graphical office suite) was developed for the Macintosh. Everything is "me too" crap, which worked for a while.
Apple is a good example of a company that was near death and transformed itself like Kodak will never be able to do. Then there are transformations like Westinghouse that went from dong just about everything to selling their name to the highest bidder to make crappy TVs.
I don't know, but it works for me.
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.
Maybe the private carriers are better for large businesses or something?
UPS offers some services that the US Post Office can't touch - like handling all of your shipping logistics. It's been a while, but 5 or 6 years ago you could have them store your goods (e.g. spare parts) in their warehouses all over the country so that when a local need came up the delivery would be faster and cheaper than if you held them in a single location.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Canada and the US are both large consumers of paper (and have been for a long time). They've had the pretty much the same levels of forest for 100 years.
thats canada and the u.s. are you aware that there are 190+ countries in addition to those two ?
and, even in that, you are wrong :
https://www.google.com/search?q=usa+imports+paper&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
"The U.S. ranks 1st in paper imports Ranking America"
http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/the-u-s-ranks-1st-in-paper-imports/
Read radical news here
The only news site I visit with consistently higher-quality user posts is The Economist's. There are one or two others that are often comparable, but the quality here is really quite high. Considering that this is the only site I place in that tier that lacks aggressive professional moderation empowered to delete posts (and routinely doing so), that is an extremely impressive feat.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Then there's the oil industry and how they purchased the patent to NiMH batteries and won't let them be used in electric cars.
Not to say that the patent owner hasn't been a pain to deal with. But, the Toyota Prius uses NiMH batteries. They're far from the best batteries for storage/weight ratio. But once you factor in operational lifetime, they're about as good as it gets at the moment.
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.