Comment Re:Pretty simple (Score 1) 200
They failed to react to changes in their market.
I worked in a Kodak paper mill at Kodak Park in Rochester, NY at the most recent turn of the century. I. WORKED. AT. A. PAPER. MILL. AT. KODAK. Might as well say I was one of the last people in the buggy whip factory.
We were developing a new kind of long lasting paper then. Welp, here's to all you other saps at Building 50 at Kodak Park. I quit in 2000 because I knew that shit was going nowhere. The video of our building getting dynamited is on YouTube. It was still a very cool place to work. They had cigarette lighters mounted in the walls of the break rooms. Cancer was so easy! You didn't even need to disturb the asbestos!
In all seriousness, there were few employers in the United States who treated their employees as well as Kodak did. That's why Kodak is pretty much no longer around, that and the fact that the state was a life-sucking vampire that used windfalls from upstate industry to fund its social programs. Look at all the other industrial giants from a bygone era who grew to greatness in upstate NY - IBM, Xerox, Bethlehem Steel, Union Carbide, General Electric, Carrier... it's like if a state could say "don't do this", they'd just put New York up as an example and not say anything else. Now, the areas that claim the most dependency on our state can claim they pay the most in taxes to balance the equation. So Goldman Sachs elites pay pennies on the dollar compared to what the old, solid industries upstate once paid, and we scrape by with a smoke-and-mirrors balanced budget. Meanwhile upstate gets depopulated as their children move south for low paying jobs. Yay, New York. We got fucked by a combination of our industries failing to adapt and our in-state brethren selling us down the river.