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Reasons Behind the Demise of Kodak
pbahra tips a story that goes into the reasons behind Kodak's decline and fall. Quoting:
"With digital, a significant shift in mind-set occurred in the meanings associated with cameras. Rather than being identified as a piece of purely photographic equipment, digital cameras came to be seen as electronic gadgets. The implications of this shift were enormous. With digital devices, newcomers such as Sony were able to bypass one of Kodak’s massive strengths: its distribution network. Instead, digital cameras became available in electronic retail outlets next to other gadgets. Kodak was now playing on Sony’s and other entrants’ turf rather than its own. Similarly, Kodak’s brand came to be associated with traditional photography rather than digital."
They failed to react to changes in their market.
How about short sighted management and poor execution, did we really need an analysis?
I'm not sure why people think that it wasn't a right and proper thing for Kodak to die.
Kodak's strenght was film photography. There turned out to be plenty of other companies with strengths in digital, why should Kodak have colonized that market? Let them produce the stuff they're good at as long as people want it, then quietly go away. There's no reason corporations need to be immortal.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Kodak was a photochemicals company. Then film disappeared, and they didn't have expertise in any other areas that would enable them to keep selling something. A best-case scenario for them is liquidation.
That didn't prevent other giants of traditional photography like Canon and Nikon to evolve and adapt to the new era, successfully competing again the new kinds.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I can't remember the exact name of the kodak but i remember one that when you took a photo, the photo would come out of it instantly. Damn I miss that kodak. Mine broke ages ago so i had to throw it out. I should of repaired it instead.
But poorly.
I never saw a digital camera from Kodak that I would want to use, let alone purchase.
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I had use of a few of their film cameras years ago, none were great.
I think they were able to sell the cameras cheaper than other companies because they owned the tech for the film and it's packaging format.
Other than the cheap point and shoot market I never saw Kodak compete well against any other camera company.
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Loved the film though....
I bought my first digital camera (Pentax) thinking it would make a nice backup to my various film SLR's.
I was wrong, I never bought film again.
No brain, no pain.
They were arrogant, and their digital products reflected this. The DCS line of Pro cameras were hugely expensive with some pretty severe limitations, and their consumer line was a joke.
Rather than correcting that, they ignored the digital market and at the same time couldn't pick a new direction to go with their existing strengths and in the end, pissed it all away. Even now, they have no clue what they want to be, an ink and printer 'giant'? Give me a break.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
read this: A Photographer's Eulogy for Eastman Kodak a couple of weeks ago and it's a good complement to TFA. Among other things, the author recalls a meeting with a Kodak product manager in the early 90's who's response to digital on the horizon was "How do we stop this thing?" He also notes this wasn't the first time Kodak's ego got in its own way. Anyway, an interesting read.
Kodak and Apple took completely different tactics when it came to seeing their markets disappear, and they've had completely different results. Kodak tried to hang on to film photography as long as they could for fear of destroying their market, which in the end happened anyway. Apple saw the iPod's days as numbered due to phones, and created the iPhone. The iPhone is killing the iPod market, but Apple now has a new, more profitable market. The same thing may also happen with the Mac and the iPad.
The reason cited in the summary, the shift in a camera being a specialized piece of equipment to a more prosaic electronic gadget, is probably one of the weakest. Serious protographers, film and digital, have always had, and continue to have, a very...uhhh...special relationship to their kit. Casual photographers always regarded cameras as just a do-hickie: a means to an end.
The big reason, the one that will be cited in every case study on disruptive technology for the next couple of decades, is that even though Kodak invented the digital camera, they couldn't get past the notion of it cannibalizing their film and development business until it was too late. Probably the #2 reason that will be cited is the consumer's shifting relationship to images: the physical artifact, the print, became much less important in comparison to an image that could be emailed to 10,000 people in an instant practically for free. Or to be able to carry around 10,000 images in your pocket. What people wanted pictures for, and where/when/how they wanted to view them, moved away from the physical artifact with alarming speed.
Kodak's demise started years ago. The company was very diversified back in the 80's and 90's. Chemicals, pharmaceuticals, copiers, all over the place. Then someone took a look at the margins, and decided that the margins the company was seeing on film needed to be the benchmark for the company. Margins on film are ridiculous. Nothing could touch them, and it was a dangerous drug. If Kodak had to make a decision between diverting some cash away from film and into an emerging technology, they choose film. Then, one by one, less profitable areas were sold or spun off. Over the years they used those sales (and layoffs) to offset the dwindling returns from the film manufacturing.
Kodak was in a perfect position to take a major bite out of the digital market early on. But right around the time they decided not to make traditional film cameras any more and switched to disposables, they also decided that the market was rich enough to support digital photography.
In the end they sold and cut as far as they could go. Meanwhile many of the other properties that Kodak shed along the way are doing very well, and would have provided tentpoles for the company to survive under.
1975: Steven Sasson, then an electrical engineer at Kodak, invented the digital camera.
1976: The Bayer Pattern color filter array (CFA) was invented by Eastman Kodak researcher Bryce Bayer. The order in which dyes are placed on an image sensor photosite is still in use today. The basic technology is still the most commonly used of its kind to date.
They also produced the first digital SLRs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS
And, their sensor division made extremely high quality sensors for scientific, industrial and consumer cameras.
Makes it even more ironic and baffling that they couldn't make it in the digital world.
Other news-worthy stories:
Horseshoe manufacturers no longer in business. Why?
Ovaltine sales down. Are newer sports drinks to blame?
Crossbows seeing sudden resurgence: Could unreliability of easy to make ammo be to blame?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
So much for the Kodak moment.
Kodak did reasonably well with digital photography -- hell, they invented the digital camera. Unfortunately it's a commodity business now, and Kodak never really differentiated itself, arrogantly thinking its name recognition alone would move cameras (and for a while it did, but that didn't last). Combine this with the fact that they've never been able to retool a product line in anything less than two decades. Whenever they do get a CEO with some vision, the board stabs him in the back, and he's usually out before his contract is even up.
Their current leadership has decided to keep their manufacturing line and kill digital cameras. That's like if Apple decided to stop selling Macs and only sell XServe racks.
That's not entirely true. They saw digital photography coming before most people did (they still have many of the original digital photography patents to show for it). They had digital cameras on the market while Canon and Nikon were still saying bits would never replace film, and Sony was still making cassette Walkmans. Their biggest problem was public perception rather than reality. People still saw them as a film company rather than a camera company.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
What killed Kodak was the demise of the photographic consumables business. They had a 70% margin on film. The margin on photographic paper was probably even higher. And the developing business was profitable, too. All the consumables products had strong repeat business. Digital cameras offered none of that.
Kodak kept trying to somehow attach a consumable to digital photography. They tried PhotoCD, printer paper, and ink. They even tried selling flash memory cards. They bought Ofoto, an early picture-sharing site, and tried to make it a pay service. None of those offered the margins or market presence that film did, and none were notably successful.
Without a consumables business, Kodak had no competitive edge.
The end came when cameras became a component of phones. There was no longer a defined low-end photography business at all.
This article struck me as pretty weak. The Economist has done a series of articles on Kodak and I think theirs were much more thorough and insightful.
Technological change: The last Kodak moment?
Kodak's woes: Out of focus
Kodak files for bankruptcy protection: Gone in a flash
I'm not sure how much of that is accessible to nonsubscribers...
Breakfast served all day!
I blame the states that legalized medical marijuana. Those dark film canisters used to be perfect for storing small amounts of weed, now everyone keeps them in clear jars, no need to hide whats in the container.
Kodak mostly equalled photographic film, with some cheap cameras thrown in. The film side disappeared, leaving the not-so-stellar cameras to work on as a base. I think no-one would say that Kodak really 'got' equipment. They 'got' film.
Compared to Canon and Nikon, which took some time to pick up the digital electronics, but customers understood their passion for equipment and machinery. These companies survived, only now being overtaken by electronics companies such as Sony (hey, who needs a flapping mirror that also makes lens design more difficult).
Now the question is: why did Fuji survive? Probably because of faster adjustment to market changes.
Ultimately- they did try changing to digital- and as pointed out above, they pioneered digital. That's not why they failed- they failed because they produced a low quality product. Their name soon became synonymous with sub-quality cameras. They could no longer fall back on the reputation with film- because it was a completely different product.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
No one knows what destroyed Kodak. Maybe never will, because there are so many reasons and every little group wants to take sole credit for figuring it out, for their little group having the power to destroy a big company.
The techies think its digital cameras. After all, they destroyed all other former film giants; Oh wait, the didn't.
The photog-groupies think they failed technically or failed in marketing film beginning the slide (sorry for the pun) decades ago and they never really recovered from Fuji. Maybe if Fuji never existed then Kodak would have had the dough needed to transition to stay alive. This seems to be ... slightly overexaggerated.
The financial types think its because they were addicted hopelessly to high margin film and couldn't financially handle converting to a design, branding, and Chinese importing house. Based on previous bond and other financing structure, etc, better to continue 25% on declining sales, than lower percentage on increasing sales. This makes little sense, it hardly stopped HP from converting from "we make the worlds best electronic test instruments" to "we import junk from China and slap a nameplate and some marketing on it".
Journalists who convince people to read their customers marketing, according to the article, think the marketing failed and they didn't spend enough money on print ads convincing people Kodak = digital instead of film. As if people still read newspapers. I have a funny newspaper anecdote, my son was asking what Grandma's newspaper was; I thought about it for a few seconds and told him it's like yesterdays internet news, but printed out for people without the internet. Oh, OK.
Personally I think its a lot like the decline and fall of the roman empire No single simple answer other than the mental state of the entire world swung around to "I'm better off without these guys, than with these guys, so bye bye" Individually not interesting, multiplied across basically the entire population, that becomes interesting. Other than a bunch of now unemployed people, who really NEEDs Kodak? Why without them we won't have ... um...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
According to Wiki, Nintendo started out as a playing card company. I knew there was some Japanese company involved in computers or electronics that started out long before modern computing. I couldn't recall exactly which one it was. Perhaps there are several.
Anyway, whatever Nintendo did they could have done that to keep the company alive. I would submit that it doesn't matter.
The adaptability of the economy is more important than the adaptability of individual companies. Or perhaps there is more than one way to look at it. If the Japanese can run their economy by keeping companies alive and changing what they do, that's good. If the US can run its economy by killing off companies and creating new ones, that's good.
The Japanese way is probably easier on people who work for a particular company. The American way might be easier for people who want to start new companies. At least, that's the reputation--Japan, work for life (but not lately) America -- start something new (but it's getting harder).
Only time will tell which model is best. I'm glad we have multiple models for now, and not one big system. To Europe I say, "I told you so". The day I heard about the Euro I was like, "really? it's like people who already fight trying to solve their problems by getting married".
Perhaps not true in the professional and medical imaging markets, but even in the film era their consumer cameras and optics were the cheapest garbage available. Never once did I have a Kodak camera in my hand and think, "wow, this is a great peice of hardware". They failed in the consumer electronics approach to the market.
Their film was the cash cow and for the most part the standard bearer. Their cameras were not, they ceded the quality consumer camera business to others. Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Pentax, Minolta, etc.
When the $40 point and shoot camera satisfies the needs of 98% of the market...then it's a bit different story.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Kodak made the vast majority of its revenue from photographic film (both retail and specialty) and the processing associated with said film (producing prints, copies, slides, etc). People using cameras would purchase 100's of dollars of film and film processing costs on a repeating basis.
Then digital cameras came out in the retail space. Many people were willing to tolerate the generally inferior optics and picture quality/stability (stability means how long does the printed photograph hold its image quality before fading) which were the primary playing fields for competition in the film industry. Very rapidly, people started buying a $200 camera may be once every 5 years instead of spending $100 every couple months on film because the public stopped valuing what they had traditionally valued with the film market.
It doesn't take a genius to do the math and see what that does to Kodak's revenue stream. Sure, they were selling cameras also. They were even selling digital cameras. They also tried to move into the scanner/printer/printer-ink market. But the majority of their revenue stream (from repeated sales of film and film processing) started drying up rapidly. Selling a $200 camera once every 5 years doesn't make up the ground that they lost due to lack of repeated film sales. Now their entire internal infrastructure, which was built out to support their film technologies and the associated revenue stream, is suddenly starving for cash. Nor is there any easy way to convert that existing infrastructure into producing an entirely different product (digital cameras instead of film), so not only is the infrastructure sucking up Kodak's cash, there is no easy way to reclaim the money that was sunk into that infrastructure and re-purpose it to the new market.
Imagine what would happen to companies like Gillette if a new product emerged which used lasers to shave one's face in a couple seconds. Suddenly all those people who were buying razors on a repeating basis would stop because they would buy the ronco-matic laser-shave. Could Gillette survive such a shift? Even if they got into that new market, they would be saddled with the infrastructure and sunk costs that they had from their old business model, and they would start getting sucked dry. The companies entering the new market would not be burdened with pre-existing sunk costs and could compete at price points that the established company could not.
It was simply a shift in the market place (possibly driven by the wide spread availability of a new technology at a low price point) which caused the incumbent companies to suffer and allowed relative new comers, or those who were more closely aligned with the new technology, to prosper.
You have a very, very strange definition of "diversifying its business". Last time I checked, being allowed to prevent competition in parts and service is hardly "diversifying", but - yes - anti-trust level of behavior that justifies bringing in those nasty, evil gummint boorocrats and their attack dogs to get a ruling from the Supreme Court that backed up the "attack dogs". If it was, say, Intel or MS, would you have the same opinion?
Kodak, as far as i know, is one of the last producers of legacy film standards.
Is the death of Kodak dire news for film buffs?
-HasHie
I would of kept purchasing kodak if they hadn't pulled the stupid bit with their docking stations being different for each line of cameras they sold. It's bad enough when many companies can't settle on a simple USB plug in but when you have to throw away your old docking station and printer because you changed to a different model line just so they can force you to rebuy stuff - that was too much for me.
I ran into that on a warranty repair. They no longer supported that model and sent me a replacement that had a different dock than the original - so while the camera was fixed/replaced - the entire setup I bought was rendered useless. When I called and complained they weren't helpful at all.
That's all it took to never buy kodak again.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
My opinion about all government is the same, whatever the issue. All the anti-trust is nonsense, there are no natural monopolies, only government created ones. The times that anti-trust was applied, it was always against an economy of scale, but never against a monopoly, because those companies didn't have government protecting them in the market, and they always had some form of competition by the time the lawsuit was in progress. Gov't uses antitrust to subsidise their friends, who pay them in order to get into that business by lowering their barriers to entry through artificial regulations, which hurt the market, never helps the actual clients of the companies that the gov't is engaged against.
You can't handle the truth.
Oh, and in case of Intel and MS, it was all a standard shakedown, that's how government mafia operates - they want money, they'll shake you down for it.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes they embraced digital, but not full heartedly. And they had a good brand name but did not capitalize on that with their cheaper cameras.
When digital cameras came out, people bought Kodak for brand quality. Over the years it just turned into cameras with a Kodak label slapped on. The attitude: We have to be in this market, but these aren't the real camera buyers.
I got an older 8MP non-Kodak, which allows for manual focus, manual stops, and exposure settings! The 7MP Kodak Easyshare has none of that, just "modes". Well, it at least has some bracketing, where it lets you take three pictures in a row. With the 14MP Kodak Easyshare that was gone as well, instead it has exciting new features like smile detection...
In the old analog world, that stuff used to be Polaroid's brand image, not Kodak's. Don't do Disney if you have a professional brand name. The same hardware could have provided an "expert-mode" and -even if most people wouldn't use it- been seen as a limited beginners version of a better camera.
You must be really butthurt over the fact Ron Paul isn't going to win the nomination, aren't you?
Rant on, Randroid.
I think I just realized why we have this derisive and abusive notion that a person who uses a point-and-shoot cameras is "just some dork with a camera." We're conflating the art of photography with the practice of recording an event in a visual format using the science that allowed for both. Unfortunately, these two acts do not have separate words in English so I will coin one now...
Let us call the act of taking pictures to record events "picturing" instead and things become far more clear:
This lets us say: "Casual picturers always regarded cameras as just a do-hickie: a means to an end."
You would be an amateur photographer (yes, amateurs can still be called amateurs even when on a shoe-string budget) rather than a picturer. I am "only" (though to be derisive about such a thing is to misunderstand) a picturer. I have no interest in the art of photography but I would like to have a keepsake to help remember that time I climbed a mountain. However, to call me "some dork with a camera" is unfair to me. It is not my intent to make great art, only to have a memento of the past that I can show others.
So can we stop being pompous jerks about photography so that I don't get chided for having poor composition skills and not understanding what f-stops are for?
They failed to produce compelling digital products. It really is that simple. Kodak had an early lead on the consumer space based on brand alone, much later than most would have imagined, especially among female buyers. The software bundled with the cameras was equally bad.
I know several people that worked at Kodak and I interviewed quite a few times with them. IMHO these are the problems:
- They didn't want to believe digital was going to take over the market. They believed analog was superior (which it was back in the day) but also that it wouldn't improve and people always would need analog copies. This is true to an extent but their developing process was horrendously overpriced and the stores that developed internally went with Fuji or any other competitor.
- Bad management. They had several layers of management and most of them were incompetent. There were entire divisions being ran without the knowledge of Kodak leadership. Duplicated efforts, bad building, bad quality assurance, several layers of customer service and technical service. Even their later printer divisions suffered from the old structure.
- Patent warfare. Instead of trying to compete they started using patents and contracts as an offensive measure which brings some cash in the short term but it burns out really quickly as their competitors could easily pay for the settlements and the limited settlements they did have (as many of their patents were invalid) could not account for the waste that is still going on to this day.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Apple was breaking into an entirely new, hugely competitive industry. Huge downside if they failed. I think they overlooked 3rd party apps in the beginning. Remember how we all jailbreaking them the first six months just to expose the UNIX shell and SDK? Stopping thinking of phones as communicators and as mobile computers changed the game.
When everybody and their idiot brother is making a $40 point and shoot camera, that 98% of the market gets small fast. It's a market of shrinking prices and ever-slimmer margins, where consumer preferences shift on a (sometimes literal) dime. It's a death spiral of quality that pushes anyone who can afford something better into the higher-end products. You don't get into that market to build a future for your brand, you do it to make a quick buck with low risk before jumping onto the next hot trend.
Kodak's Portra and Ektar films are amazing.
I never saw a digital camera from Kodak that I would want to use, let alone purchase.
I did, but I couldn't afford them. Kodak was positioned to dominate the digital SLR market long before it became a hot consumer trend. They bailed out right when digital photography started taking off.
So can we stop being pompous jerks about photography so that I don't get chided for having poor composition skills and not understanding what f-stops are for?
Seriously, NO!
Photography is just about the last thing I have left to (at least vaguely) legitimately be a pompous jerk about.
I've probably spent more in glass than you spent on your last car!
Hell, they *invented* a new term for people like me! (Pro-Sumer aka people with more money and delusions of competence than any real-talent, although sheer force of good-luck does occasionally turn up some diamonds).
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Back in 1998, I got a lawsuit threat from Kodak. They were upset that an animation fan web site in Canada used the term "Image Bank" for one of its sections, learned that I was also a fan of the same animation series, and therefore deduced that I was the proper recipient of a rather nasty cease&desist.
I ended up ignoring the C&D, and nothing further came of it. However, as of that day, I ceased buying ANY Kodak product.
If it happened today, I would send them a rather sharply-worded f*ck you, both to the lawyer, the PR department, and corporate management, detailing their massive idiocy in sending threatening letters to people who have nothing to do with what made them unhappy.
once digital got decent enough where people actually wanted them, then every electronics maker in the world started making them, and where was Kodak? Sitting around with a mediocre "me to" product on the shelf with 1000 others.
I always kind of thought it snobby of them, why should I buy this camera? cause it says Kodak on the front? that Toshiba has more features and better image quality for about the same price, and the last Toshiba product I bought wasn't a chunk of shit ...
I once had a contract on the president's desk to bring Snapfish to Japan. They were very enthusiastic and about to sign. It was early time in that market in Japan. However when the economy is on a downturn American companies tend to get tunnel vision, more conservative and domestically oriented. It's predictable. The Board of Directors said, "Japan? Who's that?" and decided to nix it. This left such a bad taste in my mouth that I started working more with European companies which had a slightly longer view even though I'm an American. Now there are output shops all over the place in Japan and it has morphed into a kind of shop where you can plug a phone or camera memory card into a card reader, use a custom application to pick the photos you want, and have it printed in an hour or burned to CD. Using the awesome high speed color photo printers Kodak pioneered, too. The same shop (like Pallette Plaza) also sells phones too, and it is profitable enough that there is a very nice one on one corner I know where the real estate is pretty expensive. This is just one experience and not so recent, but I always wondered about how Kodak was going to hang on if they didn't want to try new markets.
We enjoy all the phones from a thousand company's because they did not try to milk it for a million years like others.
I will buy anything these people sell in the future.
Big wet smooch Kodak.
Kodak EasyShare
The skills and factories needed to turn oil and silver into film are not required in the digital era.
And in the transition to digital, they're just another company - even if they weren't reluctant about digital, which they clearly were, there was nothing special about them that would make them a front runner in the digital shakeout.
Well, its all well and good to point to Kodak and say "see, they should have gone hog wild with digital." From that, we would infer, companies should ditch profitable core businesses and competencies whenever a technology billed as disruptive presents itself.
But...
What about all the times investors pour billions into some new technology or concept that completely flames out. Perhaps that new technology is too much, too soon, and it is better to let someone else take the risks. De Havilland invented the passenger jet, but was nearly bankrupted by it after a series of crashes and had to be bought out. Concord was a money loser from the get go. Chrysler, back in the day, spent lavish sums on trying to put a jet turbine into a car. Wankel Rotary engines pretty much destroyed AMC and almost destroyed Mazda as well. Boeing's massively composite 787 has seen delay after delay, the original investors of the super modern Empire State Building took a beating. Finally, there's IK Brunels Great Eastern, which was a wonderful piece of technology for its day that ruined everyone who had a shilling to stand near it.
So... yes, there's plenty of people out there that say Kodak should have changed. But, if you look at FY 2000's annual report, Kodak was actually making 3 billion a year in digital sales... and the company was paying a decent dividend.
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/annualReport00/financialHighlights.shtml
Besides, nobody has stated the obvious. Kodak had a reputation as a maker of film, not cameras. For Kodak to have survived, it would have had to either develop enough FAB experience to try and corner the market on CCDs, or establish itself as a premium maker of cameras and that would mean going up against some stiff competition where brands who have a proven track record in optics and glass were the brand differentiators.
Sure Sony is doing "ok" with its digital cameras, but really, for photographers, the people that have the best reputation of making cameras were always the ones poised to win from the digital transition. Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Minolta, all those -camera- brands flourish, because people buy cameras... and they didn't need film anymore, and that's why Kodak died.
This is my sig.
They failed to found the Film Industry Association of America, which could have then lobbied Congress to either outlaw digital photography, or attach a special tax on all digital cameras that would be used to subsidize companies that provide traditional film cameras and supplies.
Now noone uses film.
how do you destroy this public image? Kodak=film
Kodak is not dead, they only filed chapter 11 bankruptcy. Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows for the restructuring of the business to make if profitable again. A look at three major bankruptcies — Continental Airlines, Kmart and Fruit of the Loom — shows that outcomes can vary widely. Citicorp Group just gave Kodak $950 million. Sounds like Kodak will be around for a while longer and that Citicorp is pretty sure they are going to get their money back with interest.
Also, not only is there still a significant portion of photographers still using film in their daily workflows, but quite a few professionals are actually switching back to film and leaving digital. Kodak has introduced several new film stocks over the past year that have been well accepted among the photographer's still shooting film. The film division is still doing quite well, and is still producing a profit. In fact, the film division reported a 20% increase in sales last quarter.
Kodak will look much different in the years to come, but I wouldn't give up on Kodak yet.
Interesting. As for quality: I spent years in the UK and Europe, taking photographs with Kodak, Agfa, and Fujitsu slide film.
A few decades later, the Kodaks look fine, and the others are faded trash, notwithstanding the initially bright colors Agfa and Fujitsu then used as their selling feature. In fact, I have early family Kodak slides, taken more than 70 years ago - soon after the development of Kodachrome. They still look pretty good.
So, "image problems" in the UK notwithstanding, for me, Kodak slides have lasted twice as along as the competition's products.
A friend of mine (now retired) spent his career at Kodak. He interprets Kodak's demise simply as a failure to recognize that "yellow boxes" with their high margins would die as quickly as they did.
Sorry, I have a Pet Rant on Borders, and you walked into it.
From an Article about Adapting, Borders was a Moron-Company.
The Future of Physical Books is Print Live On Demand. Forget the shipping, the stocking, the overages, the underages. Just print the damn thing.
The tech is out there. I have three vitally important Case-Tomes from Harvard Bookstore *TwoYears Ago*. Forget Amzon and "Go Home, Wait Three Days". Just "Print the thing in an hour".
But no. They couldn't be bothered to spend $100,000 "Medium Peanuts" per machine and secure the Digital Rights per copy.
So no, I have zero sympathy for Borders.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Although a super awesome idea, I don't think book publishers would had allowed it since it would had meant that the store would not only be in a position to demand a bigger slice of the sale but also to print it's own classic literature books on demand, cutting off publishers of that business.