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from the the-times-they-are-a-changing dept.
In defense of Kodak and its 'failure' to innovate:
Kodak has been the ultimate bogeyman of MBA programs. You've heard the story. The company held an unassailable position in one the world's largest markets. It had a deep, lasting brand with consumers and professionals along with a high-margin recurring revenue stream.
But it failed to fully understand the impact of emerging technologies. It couldn't get its 100+ year-old self to pivot in time. It didn't cross the chasm and cannonballed deep into the abyss.
You could build a small mountain out of the airport books that regurgitate this horror story.
It's also not exactly true. With established companies facing competition and upstarts claiming to have the upper hand through disruption, now is a good time to re-examine the myth:
- Kodak faced a transition few, if any, companies could have made
- But it could have been a brand!
- But it didn't invest in innovation!
- But now there's nothing left!
[Note - This story comes from TheNextWeb's Podium section which is described as "Opinion, advice, and analysis by the TNW community". -- Ed.]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by theluggage on Monday November 25 2019, @02:40PM (4 children)
...but Kodak's problem wasn't that they didn't have a digital camera. Kodak's big, mass-market business was film and processing. Sure, they had a "professional imaging" division making serious-callers-only stuff, but their consumer cameras were always cheap'n'cheerful low-end products sold on the "razors & blades" model (...and if you went for another brand of camera, well, your local photo processor was likely a Kodak franchise - ISTR that high-street processing was basically Kodak vs. Fuji by then).
Pre digital, people came back from holidays with a dozen 36-exposure reels of Kodachrome and dropped them off at the pharmacist to have every single frame printed. Post-digital... they maybe printed off a few shots on their Epson/Canon/HP inkjet. Even a digital camera made by Kodak would have killed Kodak's core business model.
So, they could have made consumer/prosumer digital cameras (actually, they did, and also tried to create an extensible 'camera OS' that could accept custom scripts and plug-ins with the hope of becoming the Microsoft of digital photograph) - but in the consumer/prosumer camera market, Kodak were haunted by the memory of the Instamatic and the Brownie and faced stiff competition from Nikon/Canon/Olympus - while the likes of Sony and Panasonic already had a reputation from the video camera market which they supplemented by licensing the Zeiss and Leica brands for their lenses. "Wooh - look it's got an Ektar lens!" said nobody ever, at all. Even if they'd succeeded, a successful camera brand could never have competed with the former size of their film & processing empire.
Or, they could have gone for the home printing market (paper & ink seems like the obvious replacement for film & processing and closer to their core expertise) - but then they'd have had to compete with established household names in printing like Epson, Canon and HP (most domestic users would have been looking for a multi-purpose printer) - for a business that was still much smaller than the old photo processing biz.
...and if they had made a go at either of those, it would only have taken them through the low-2000s until camera phones and the internet did unto "traditional" consumer digital cameras as digital had done unto film.
What they did do was perfectly sensible without the aid of hindsight: Some people may remember the Kodak Photo CD as (a) a good, cheap way of getting decent-quality film scans for multimedia products in the days before affordable, high quality digicams and (b) an apparently hare-brained scheme to get Joe Sixpack to buy a player and show holiday snaps on their TV. However, it was also part of a wider scheme to upgrade their processing network to digital printing, so they could digitally fix your crap photography skills and then offer you prints, blow-ups, mouse mats, coffee cups etc. whether you came in with a film, a Photo CD or a memory card. In an alternate universe where people came back from vacation with half-a-dozen (hmm - lets adjust for time period) SmartMedia cards and wanted every single shot printed (which is probably still a lot cheaper and faster than home printing) that might have worked (again, until phones and social media).
Or, Kodak should have invented Instagram in 1996... but, hey, I could have done that, if only...
NB: I don't know if I've just repeated what TFA said, but whatever that godawful mess that TFS linked to was, it wasn't legible.
(Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday November 25 2019, @02:54PM (2 children)
Not legible? ooookay.
Their points were:
1) Kodak did innovate, but was not set up to build digital hardware itself.
2) It struck licensing deals for its name, but failed to get market capture with that.
3) They tried more innovation in hardware (OLED) [and as you noted PhotoCD] but again couldn't put it into production cheaply enough themselves [or gain a proprietary format advantage that paid off].
4) Kodak isn't dead. It divested it's chemical arm [and it's radiology imaging division to Carestream - something the article doesn't mention. Also Kodak still sits on $1.5 billion in assets, revenue of $1.3 billion, net income of $16 million, and $170 million of equity. Far from a dead company].
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @01:45AM (1 child)
Revenue of $1.3 BILLION and a net income of only $16 MILLION???
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:17AM
According to their financial data below on page 45, they had a total loss of 16 million dollars on 1.3 billion in revenue (181 million gross profit). As pointed out in a different part, they had about 150 million dollars worth of expenses this year that they didn't have previous years for complicated reasons.
https://secfilings.nasdaq.com/filingFrameset.asp?FilingID=13335299&RcvdDate=4/1/2019&CoName=EASTMAN%20KODAK%20CO&FormType=10-K&View=html [nasdaq.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @04:03PM
16 years ago since I last submitted film for developing...
A dozen reels? Holy shit that would have been expensive. A picture was precious at the time, you chose the occasion much more carefully, and there was a chance the picture could fail.
I tried ordering a photocd once, the shop gave me back a regular cd with the images in 640x480.