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."

Comments

bad data source

[Lehk228]

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

Re:bad data source

[osu-neko]

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.

For the purposes of the point being made, that's precisely why flickr is the perfect site. Kodak's market never was the "drunken pics at the bar" market. Losing a market you never had to begin with has no impact on your bottom line.

Of course they're dying

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The article is weak

[gzipped_tar]

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.

Classic disruptive techonology problem

[robla]

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.

Re:Changing business

[Isaac-1]

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.

Re:Poor analysis - its film not the camera itself

[Lumpy]

"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.