Kodak-Branded Smartphones On the Way

An anonymous reader sends news about Kodak's latest attempt to come back from the grave. "For a while there it looked like Kodak's moment had come and gone, but the past few months have seen the imaging icon fight back from the brink of irrelevance. Now the company's planning to push a Kodak-branded smartphone, and thankfully it's not going to sue everyone in the business along the way this time. To be clear, Kodak won't actually make its own devices — instead, it's going to farm out most of the development work to an English company called Bullitt."

Comments

Ok....

[Anonymous Coward]

Old school company decides it's way out of bankruptcy is to compete in a market where one leader takes more profit than all the other competitors put together, and the other leader has more market share than anyone else. What could possibly go wrong?

Sorry guys, you should be looking to sell Kodak-licensed camera tech to the big smartphone vendors.

Re:Ok....

[Anonymous Coward]

That apostrophe is confusing. Is it that hard to learn the difference between it's and its?

Re: Ok....

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently it's. Many people have trouble with it.

Umm, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not Kodak, as they are dead. In their dying spasm they sold their name so it can be placed on mediocre rebadged crap. It's disingenuous to talk about Kodak as if their lineage of innovation continues, and isn't just some jerkoffs who bought a famous brand name and are pushing trash and stomping that name into ground until all possible profit can be reamed loose.

Re:Umm, no.

[Dogtanian]

That's not Kodak, as they are dead. In their dying spasm they sold their name so it can be placed on mediocre rebadged crap.

Pretty much identical to what happened to 'Polaroid'. Every corpse has its maggots, I suppose.

While it's true that this *is* what happened to Polaroid- that is, the original company is effectively dead and liquidated (*) and the post-2001 "Polaroid" is an unrelated company that bought the name (**) and some of the assets- it technically *isn't* what happened to Kodak.

The present-day Kodak is still the same company. They went into bankruptcy protection, were forced to sell some things off, (***) and then emerged from that about 18 months ago.

That's not to say that they won't be indulging in name licensing anyway, and in this case it's unclear how much- if any- involvement Kodak themselves will have in the manufacture of this phone, or its sale.

In fact, before the bankruptcy it was clear to me that Kodak's problem was that in order to stay afloat in the short term they were being forced to sell off everything that would enable them to survive in the long term (i.e. patents and technical assets). My guess was that- at best- Kodak would survive as a massively pared down shadow of its former self, and at worst would be entirely liquidated and its name sold off to be whored out for its recognition in rebranding cheap generic electronics made by anonymous manufacturers in the Far East (a la "Polaroid").

Then again, even if the core of the "original" Kodak survives with ownership of its name intact, it's open to question how meaningful this would be if most of what made it "Kodak" had been sold off and it had to become little more than a brand-licensing operation anyway.

(*) As far as I can tell, the original Polaroid still "exists", but only as a dormant (and renamed) legal entity that conducts no business and I'm assuming is kept on life support for purely legal reasons related to liabilities after the bankruptcy.

(**) Actually, AFAICT, the company that bought the Polaroid name (apparently quite dubious) themselves went bankrupt, so I'm not sure if the current owners are actually "Polaroid 3"(!!!) Not that it matters much. To be fair, the current owners do appear to be trying to use Polaroid's legacy more respectfully as far as cameras go (e.g. portable printers and cameras with that Lady Gaga tie-up a couple of years back), but they're still continuing the previous owner's model of licensing the name out to third-party distributors who use it to rebrand low-quality generic LCD TVs et al.

(***) I'm not entirely clear what was sold off. One report suggested (if I read it correctly) that they were going to give the film business to the UK pension fund to settle liabilities there, but from what I can tell that's not actually what happened in the end, and Kodak themselves still control the film business.