The Rise and Fall of Kodak 352
H_Fisher writes "Michael Hiltzik of the L.A. Times writes with a frank look at the decisions and changes that have led to Kodak's decline from top U.S. photography company to a company whose product is almost irrelevant. He writes: '[Kodak] executives couldn't foresee a future in which film had no role in image capture at all, nor come to grips with the lower profit margins or faster competitive pace of high-tech industries.' He also notes that Kodak's story comes as a cautionary tale to giants like Google and Facebook."
There's nothing new here (Score:3, Informative)
Companies already know what happens when you don't continue to innovate. The book:The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business goes into great detail and is basic reading at most business schools.
Re:Horse and buggy companies didn't make it either (Score:5, Informative)
But Kodak is still trying to cling to the film business. Their new products are things like a digital camera with a built in printer, sort of a hybrid version of their older instant cameras. People just dont seem interested.
Re:Horse and buggy companies didn't make it either (Score:2, Informative)
I worked on a project with Kodak to do a project for a company that dealt with disposable camera's and photo galleries. It by itself was an amazing idea and very useful even now, however they we're horrible and the project failed horribly. The world has left them behind.
In a world where they had to do little more than free image galleries and the brand could have killed off a flicker years late, they continued to throw away everything they built.
Re:Horse and buggy companies didn't make it either (Score:4, Informative)
A few excerpts from Kodak develops: A film giant's self-reinvention [wired.co.uk] (Feb 2010) seem to suggest they just couldn't transition fast enough rather than became irrelevant.
The usual explanation is that Kodak failed to see the approach of digital.
In fact, Kodak was more than ahead of its competitors: it invented the digital camera -- even though it lacked the foresight to exploit it.
Re:Rochester (Score:4, Informative)
Business, not just Kodak, has fled Rochester and skilled workers need to follow the businesses to get jobs. Meanwhile, thanks to NY's lax and generous welfare policies, people are coming in to suck off the government's teat. The state itself is tone deaf since all that matters to the state is Albany and NYC. Of course, the fact that the incompetent police chief turned mayor that caused half the problems above got promoted to Lt Governor means that we'll chuck some more money on wasteful projects like his grand idea to buy and tear Midtown down to the tune of tens of mllions at taxpayer expense, only to turn it around to a business that never actually signed a contract to develop the land in the way he announced. Oh, and the property was in tax arrears and could have been foreclosed on, but why bother when he's not spending his own money to buy it?
Kodak, while painful, has been the least of Rochester's problems... and today, it's almost irrelevant, save for the outdated, often abandoned, infrastructure they've left all over the city.
Re:Horse and buggy companies didn't make it either (Score:5, Informative)
No, they didn't make the first DSLR 20 years ago. What they did was basically sell an add-on that attached to your Nikon SLR to make it digital. Kodak never made any DSLRs themselves; they were always digital backs, or based on Canon or Nikon bodies, or sometimes just rebranded Canons or Nikons.
There's a huge market for camera components. Film is dead (at least for stills, film is slowly moving that way), but the DSLR market is alive and well, and companies like Sony are making a fortune selling camera modules to go into the iPhone and other devices.
Kodak could have been selling millions of mobile camera modules, or competing with Nikon and Canon for the high-end, but they're not.
Re:Why just cautionary for Google and Facebook? (Score:2, Informative)
If you get the annual reports you'd see that the plurality of IBM's revenue is Software and the majority of the profit is Software.
IBM Credit Corporation comes in 2nd, and services and hardware vie for last place.
Re:Horse and buggy companies didn't make it either (Score:5, Informative)
They had an angle into that market; they made CCD's for high-end digital SLR's for a long time. I know they sold sensors to Olympus, among others, for years. Olympus wound up switching to Panasonic as a sensor supplier for technical reasons related to video capture, but lots of folks still swear by the old Kodak sensor cameras.
Re:There's nothing new here (Score:5, Informative)
while it's true that jumping on a bad fad could bankrupt you, only an idiot would have continued to believe that digital wasn't going to succeed. The prices for digital cameras was low enough that instamatics just couldn't compete, on original price alone. Granted, the early digital cameras pictures sucked in quality, but knowing the speed of new tech improving that was solely limited by manufacturing process would quickly let you guess about when the image quality would be close to film. Moore's law and all - it was only a couple of years after the initial 1-2 MP cameras came out that the 3 and 5 MPs came out, and 5MP was good enough for a pocket camera to rival the print of a cheap 35mm camera, and that's pretty much the beginning of the real end for film. Digital didn't add on the processing costs for film, you could take 100 pictures, "process" them on the spot, and take another 100, pretty much for "free". The best film could do was 1 hour processing at a relatively high cost, and 36 max pics per roll. (I can take over 1000 in RAW mode on my current DSLR and the way oversized Compact Flash card I have)
As for tablets, I think the market will continue to grow. There's a distinct use case for tablets, and it more than meets the needs for a large majority of the populace. Think all the current phone texters that make do with 140 characters or less thumb typing on a screen keyboard far too small for their fingers being able to enjoy much larger real estate of the tablet.
The real issue with the tablet "fad" is a bunch of companies that think throwing some hardware together in a roughly tablet sized package is sufficient keep failing, and they'll continue to fail. It's more than just hardware, if they want to even enter the edge of the iPad market.
Re:Obviously feeding a troll, but... (Score:3, Informative)
I'll reiterate something I've posted and seen posted here by others before: I don't come here for the news, I come here for the comments
Re:There's nothing new here (Score:5, Informative)
Floppies?! The first digital camera I had (a Kodak DC20) had a megabyte of fixed storage, and that was it! We could fit 8 493x373 pics, or 16 320x240 ones! No fancy flash or LCD, either! The only way to get the pictures out of it was through a slow, serial cable at ~50 kbps! At the time, we WISHED we could use big, fast, portable floppies!
Now, kids, get off my lawn!!
Re:Horse and buggy companies didn't make it either (Score:3, Informative)
Not only did they make CCDs for high-end digital SLRs, but they sold high-end digital SLRs in partnership with Nikon and Canon early in the switch to digital cameras [wikipedia.org] in the 1990s. Kodak was a genuine innovator, and for a while these Kodak/Nikon cameras were THE camera that journalists used world-wide. The cameras weren't cheap ($10k+), but they were the first cameras that could legitimately be called a replacement for film, rather than the simple cameras with pathetic 640x480 resolution that were available for general consumer use for a few hundreds of dollars. These "professional" models were cameras that had high resolution (thousands of pixels by thousands of pixels), a camera with good optics, and battery life that lasted a day of shooting. They were bulky but functional. This was in the days when it was a novelty to shoot digital, upload the photo to a wire service via satellite, and have the photo sitting in the newsroom within hours of an event in a remote location somewhere in the world rather than days later via film. Now it's routine. It was obvious that as the technology improved and prices came down into the range that ordinary people could afford, this was the way things would eventually go.
The point is, Kodak wasn't backwards. They were THERE at the forefront of digital photography, they should have been very aware of what was coming, and they blew it. The camera manufacturers basically outsourced their CCD manufacturing elsewhere and then it was game over.