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Kodak Failing, But Camera Phones Not To Blame
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from The Conversation: "According to the Wall Street Journal, camera manufacturer Kodak is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, following a long struggle to maintain any sort of viable business. The announcement has prompted some commentators to claim that Kodak's near-demise has been brought on by: a failure to innovate, or a failure to anticipate the shift from analogue to digital cameras, or a failure to compete with the rise of cameras in mobile phones. Actually, none of these claims are true. Where Kodak did fail is in not understanding what people take photographs for, and what they do with photos once they have taken them."
Continues the reader: "Looking at camera data from Flickr, of images uploaded in 2011, camera phones only make up 3% of the total. Dedicated cameras from Canon, Nikon and yes, Kodak were used to take 97% of the images. What Kodak failed to understand is that people have switched from taking photos for remembering and commemorative reasons to using photos for identity and communication. The shift changes the emphasis away from print to social media platforms and dedicated apps."
flickr is a horrible source to do a study like this, it is going to bias towards 'real' cameras because it's more of a photography sharing site then it is a "drunken pics at the bar last night" site. mobile phones can upload photos straight to facebook and twitter
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Let's pretend the data is accurate and reliable. Kodak's core problem would remain the same: if you're business model is built on selling photographic film and paper, and people don't need that anymore, the company is going to fail.
Up to and including... management. You can only fire your way into a positive quarterly report so many times before you run out of peons to pee on.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
It first tried to rebuke the claims of Kodak being not able to innovate, etc, and then discussed "how people today use photos" in the examples of Flickr, Facebook, and such. It concluded with the weak argument of essentially one sentence, that "[It] is hard to see a role for Kodak in all of this." The problem with this reasoning is that exactly the same thing can be said about many of Kodak's competitors. I'm not aware whether Nikon or Canon is doing significantly better in this regard, which is to ease the "sharing and distribution" of photos through the Internet and social networking.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Even though Kodak saw digital photography coming, the problem was Kodak's whole financial structure was tied to film, and digital technology was disruptive technology. They might have been able to sustain the brand by merging with or buying the right company at the right time (e.g. Canon), but most companies have a hard time dealing with technology shifts that vaporize their main profit center. It's not as simple as just knowing what the next trend is; it's figuring out how to gracefully wind down the existing cash cow while giving the new technology the management attention and resources it needs to thrive. Even then, there still ends up being a lot of pain because you can just put all of the same people you had producing film to work in a digital camera business.
Kodak's decline goes back 30 years or more, I personally think it began with their ill fated Kodamatic (Polaroid clone) and having to pull it from the market after loosing a major patent infringement case to Polaroid. Since then it has been one bad move after another, does anyone remember the much hypes Kodak disc camera? The only good thing they had going was their high end multi thousand dollar CCD imager division which they completely failed to convert to market dominance in the consumer digital camera revolution. Sure their were also many background failures like not keeping up with Fuji and others in the 1-hour photo market in an attempt to maintain their major mail out photo lab processing centers, etc.
at this: "It would be interesting to repeat this analysis using Facebook data, but there is no reason to believe the results would be substantially different."
Yes, because the millions of smartphones out there with a camera and a Facebook app (as opposed to a flickr app) aren't going to skew the results at all.
Flickr is for people who like photography; ergo, the data is going to be skewed heavily towards actual cameras.
Facebook is for people sharing themselves with their friends and the world. One only has to peruse a random person's Facebook profile picture page to find hundreds of self-snaps taken in the bathroom, or at the pub, or on a train, or whatever.
Kodak, in my opinion, failed because they neglected to make quality products in their particular niche (easy to use, inexpensive, easy to share). They offshored their production, so Kodak cameras were notoriously hit-or-miss in regards to actually working right. They missed the highend market (then again Kodak was never known for that anyway), letting Sony, Pentax, Canon, and Nikon beat them there. They failed to leverage their gigantic photo paper experience into anything worthwhile (I own a Kodak printer that, as I type this, refuses to print due to some bizarre error I don't have time to diagnose).
In short, Kodak failed because Kodak fucked up. Photography isn't going anywhere. Hell, film photography isn't going anywhere. Kodak just stood still and let the world pass them by.
They took our Kodachrome away, and nobody cared.
hookers and grits.
Yeah, but I don't have much hope for them. They fought digital tooth and nail up until relatively recently. Do you happen to remember that film camera that they were trying to market a decade or so ago which showed a preview on an LCD on the back of the camera of what was on the film? It would have been both revolutionary and useful had they come up with it a decade or two earlier, but as it was it wasn't really useful and I think it failed pretty much immediately.
The painful thing for Kodak is that they had all sorts of useful patents and innovations related to digital photography they just haven't been able to figure out how to make use of them. At this point I think the horses are out of the bag and just spilled the milk.
As someone who knows a bit about digital photography I do believe it has everything to do with Kodak's camera product lineup. Kodak made no serious effort in high end photography, and being a typical American company they bungled what they did do, then gave up. They wanted to keep on producing cheap cameras like they had always done. But this was disrupted by two factors; along came cameraphones and knocked the low end down, and the march of technology have made the low end camera so cheap that there are no margins in them. Additionally, for a brand to have the prestige to sell a low end product, it must have a high end and upper mid-end product; Canon has dSLRs, Kodak had film... but now it doesn't.
The only way to make real money out of digital cameras is to produce high end cameras. By the time Kodak would've realised that they would have both lost the money and talent to get back into that game like Fujifilm has.
was the biggest piece of crap ever made. After working with tons of residential customers who need their computers cleaned up and ask for an explanation as to what caused their machine to take so long to boot, Kodak Easy Share was the culprit in many cases. I know they're simply trying to make it easy for old people to just plug in their camera to the computer and magically have all their photos transferred to the All Users\My Pictures folder (which is stupid btw), but the software is just pure autorun garbage and why on earth it needed to execute during start up, I have no idea. Regardless of the quality of the cameras, having any negative response on your product cannot be a good thing. I don't think it's the main reason Kodak is filing bankruptcy obviously, but I do think it may have contributed to Kodak's negative consumer image.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Kodak going broke?? No kidding!
I guess that's what happens when you refuse to change your horseshoe factories into tyre making factories after people invent cars.
If the reason Kodak failed is because they failed to see the shift in attitude towards photographs, then why is it that traditional camera makers like Canon and Nikon are alive and well?
I think the writer failed to see the obvious here. The reason Kodak failed is because Kodak is primarily a film and photo chemicals maker and not primarily a camera maker. With less people using film it is obvious Kodak can't base its business model on an obsolescent technology. Nikon and Canon are primarily camera makers and they were able to make the shift to digital successfully. Kodak was not.
Kodak's error was that it decided to hold onto a flawed business model rather than just closing down the company and returning the assets to the stockholders. Some companies are destined to close down. It's just the way it is.
>That said, Kodak also was instrumental in developing the digital camera, invented the *.psd image format
This is partly right, but not as simple. The censor at the heart of all digital cameras was invented by a Kodak employee - at a time when Kodak was among the largest patent holders in the world. The executives he showed his design to told him "Forget it, we make film not computer stuff".
The result is very much photography's own version of the XEROX-PARC/APPLE saga - as Kodak didn't see the value of what their employee had built, failed to patent it and saw his design being given to all the competition.
Thus came the digital camera revolution - one reason why it had so many competitors so early on was that nobody owned a patent on the censor until it was too late to get one - mostly because the company where it was invented hadn't thought it worth the bother of applying for.
Even if your cynical you could say that if Kodak had foreseen a possible threat from digital they could have patented the censor simply to prevent digital cameras from being made at all.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Kodak INVENTED the digital camera and was the only company selling them for the first year. It's the idiot CEO that was in place at that time that let them produce craptastic cameras instead of partnering with a camera maker.
It is their own fault. Over the history of the digital camera, the crappiest digital cameras were all kodak. WTF were they thinking? They never tried to pioneer the digital film back, that could have made them a ton of money. etc...
Kodak is dead because their leadership was stupid. They chased the maximum profits per quarter instead of chasing what would continue the company in the seachange they created themselves.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"The only problem I see, other companies made cheaper digital cameras. "
they made cheaper digitals that were a LOT better.
I owned the first Canon Digital camera model, it was 35% cheaper than the equilivant from Kodak and took 800X better photographs because it had decent glass. Kodaks' offerings were using plastic lenses with the :fuzzy: effect in every shot. Even at the low resolutions of 1.2megapixel you could see the lenses on kodak cameras were garbage.
Kodak lost because they offered garbage products.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.