Slashdot Mirror
A Tale of Two Companies
Rick Zeman writes "They've had the best of times, and now they're living through the worst of times. The Washington Post talks about the dissolution of both Kodak's and Polaroid's business models, what Kodak can learn from Polaroid's earlier mistakes, and the resurrection of some classic Polaroid tech by private entrepreneurs."
Can someone instagram some photos of hese old cameras and a "gold box" of film so I can see what the hell they're talking about?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Polaroid was always a bit of a niche company. They happened to be in a fairly big niche, but they were very unique in what they did. Their monopoly kept them going until the market changed.
Kodak was killed by shortsighted managers who could not understand the implications when they invented digital photography.
[car analogy] Both companies were buggy whip producers. Kodak invented the internal combustion engine, but never thought it would catch on.[/car analogy]
The 'buggy whip' analogy isn't quite fair to Kodak. The techniques required to produce their particular buggy whips involved a fair amount of chemical expertise. That spun off as Eastman Chemical in 1994. They may or may not be setting the world on fire; but nobody is preparing their funeral. This doesn't change the fact that Kodak is still totally fucked, or that they managed to almost entirely fail to capture the future that they invented; but if we had to horribly overload the buggy-whip analogy, it'd be fair to say that Kodak is still trying to sell buggy whips to the consumer transport market, while the market has moved on to BDSM fetishists and the production of diversified specialty leather goods.
Pity, so many people lost jobs because of a few retarded managers at the top of their companies.
There are two classes of people at Polaroid and Kodak who got the axe. The first are the technicians, engineers and related staff. Those people were going to lose their jobs regardless, as the products they made were no longer wanted. The other class of people at Kodak and Polaroid were the managers, supervisors and non-technical staff. Those people can get jobs elsewhere (and most of them have). Very few people lost their jobs who wouldn't have been let go when these companies transitioned to new technologies, except managers, who can hardly be said to be innocent victims.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Given how frequently(and often painfully, toward the end) companies seem to founder in the face of structural changes that they can't do much about(short of essentially re-founding as something else, just carrying over the campus and the capital), I have to wonder if there has been any work done outside of the barbaric corporate raider sector on building companies with clean exit strategies...
After all, there isn't any reason why a company needs to struggle to perpetuate its existence forever(any more than a company would struggle to perpetuate the existence of a given product line forever). Sure, the process that companies who do fight and then die go through is pretty grim; but that is, at least in part, because they keep struggling even after the situation is hopeless, and just bleed and bleed and bleed.
Is there a process where you just quit before you are behind, wind down neatly, rather than the corporate equivalent of spending a few years stuck full of tubes and unresponsive in the ICU?
Somewhat true. Why did Fujifilm survive? Because they correctly saw themselves as an industrial coatings company, and not a photography company.
Kodak also had great experience in *optics* (they may have made optics for some generations of surveillance satellites, very high-tech and expensive)---optics are necessary for photography but it isn't the same area exactly.
They had great expertise in two critical industrial areas, but the managers were apparently stuck on consumer photography, and did not appreciate how inexpert they were in semiconductors and consumer electronics.
Part of the problem that Kodak had was less to do with the Digital Revolution and somewhat more to do with the complex formulations of their photographic emulsions.
As I understand it some of these emulsions are so sensitive to variables that one merely couldn't take the "recipe" and scale it down to a smaller run which would work wherever a coating machine existed.. The Kodak Photo Engineers had to tweak and develop the emulsion formulations for the various films they produced to suit each vessel which they were mixed in/stored in/expelled from during production...
With many of the engineers aging and few young people coming in to the work force having the hands on access to emulsions and coating machines to learn the very specialized techniques of the Photographic Emulsion Engineering guys it put kodak in a situation where scaling down and suiting the changing market would become more and more difficult.
The end result seems to be they were producing far more film than they could sell, and were having to store it instead of making profit off of it... running operations that they knew were too large... and stuck in a spot where loyal customers might not accept the changes in emulsions that may come from downsizing the operation...
Digital imaging certainly hurt.. but the extremely complex emulsions and coating really didnt help.
The biggest loss from Kodak and as we are finding with the people trying to replicate Polaroids instant films.. is the stuff you dont learn in chemistry class, or from a masters degree in Photography.. its knowing how to troubleshoot problems with emulsions and make consistent high quality coating machines..
While a lot of the processes in the history of the medium of photography can be done without much trouble as a DIY thing.. modern high speed emulsion films and developing papers are one of the few things that are, even with the right tools and ingredients.. likely out of the realm of possibility for the most hardcore of us. (with only a few people i know of even attempting this)
This is not a "good riddance" type thing.. high speed modern film isnt replaced by digital..
With the death of many of these former emulsion engineers we stand to lose a photographic process that has been with us for over 100 years.. and that sucks.
I initially read that as "BSD fetishists" and got a bit confused. BSD isn't all that hard to use these days.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
There was little Kodak or Polaroid could do.
This is certainly true of Polaroid, but Kodak, for all intents and purposes, invented digital photography and still failed to capitalize on the technology that made their primary product obsolete.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
http://money.msn.com/investing/worst-business-decisions-ever