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: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @09:09AM (1 child)
Oh, oh, Oh my God! And it could have been an aristarchus submission, slipping throught the cracks, as aristarchus submissons are wont to do, and escaping eds attention, expose Soylentils to the follies of the alt-right, rather than this obvious observation that business schools are populated by imbeciles and persons who could not even qualify for a CDL, like our almost as stupid Runaway1865 did, at some point, if we believe his stories. So, why not the aristarchus submission, instead? At least it would be honest and not promoting Business Schools.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @09:46AM
In defense of aristarchus and its failure to journal
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 25 2019, @09:58AM (3 children)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ltLp30KVs [youtube.com]
Not every company has a song written about it's products.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @11:35PM (2 children)
MS-Windows: You make a grown man cry [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @01:57AM (1 child)
Chevy: "My four speed, dual-quad, positraction four-oh-nine" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frtVqCZub-0 [youtube.com]
Ford: "Spring little Cobra get ready to strike" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc6FmZCT0Zc [youtube.com]
Pontiac: "Turn it on, wind it up, blow it out" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_FSicQWimU [youtube.com]
Nash: "Beep, Beep..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enqNl7tdLR4 [youtube.com]
Lincoln: "Telephone poles looked like a picket fence" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDbON8udTPo [youtube.com]
Where are all the songs about computers and smart phones?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:10AM
Well, here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SSOCabqCKI [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 25 2019, @11:26AM (3 children)
Too late, intrepid article authors. Once a story enters MBA lore it stays there for all time. Thus, zeppelins are death contraptions while crashy jumbo jets are not. Chevy Novas are the worst inter-cultural branding mistake, replacing the previous "Gift from America" care packages dropped in post-Nazi Germany. And Kodak will probably stand for all time as the example of what happens when you fail to address disruptive technology.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday November 25 2019, @02:43PM (2 children)
Hey MBAs: Microsoft.
Microsoft almost missed the intarweb tubes in 1995. Just in time, they realized the mistake and with massive effort turned the supertanker.
Microsoft totally missed the smartphone and mobile device revolution.
Both of the above are by being totally fixated on their desktop monopoly. Seeing every computing device through desktop OS glasses. Microsoft's early vision of a tablet was Desktop Windows.
I can just imagine: Windows Smart Watches and fitness trackers. Windows thermostats, security cameras, set top boxes, digital cameras, microcontrollers, etc.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @11:44PM (1 child)
It's amazing Microsoft survived so many failures. They lucked out in that they found demand in medium and large businesses, as IBM, Novel, HP, and Oracle stumbled there. I guess the lesson is have your fingers in enough pies to survive a few landing in your face. [youtube.com]
I don't know what Kodak could have branched out into. Camera making tends to shift to low wage countries. Automated lens making? They did survive as a (small) chemical processing company, so perhaps they should have tried to go head to head with Dow Chemical.
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Wednesday November 27 2019, @02:39AM
Kodak had the lead in digital cameras. They were looking and making digital cameras before anyone else was. Then they stopped and went on with making film. Everyone else then made digital cameras and stopped buying film.
All they had to do was use their name and pivot to a digital platform.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Monday November 25 2019, @11:45AM (6 children)
Kodak made the first digital camera.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @06:52PM
Kodak made the first digital camera, and then did NOTHING.
Now that the name of the skeleton has been sold to the brand-diluting new owners, it is no longer of ANY significance. The word "Kodak" on a product now is a warning label to keep your money IN your wallet and your wallet IN your pocket.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @01:32PM (4 children)
"It was in the business of chemical processing, i.e. creating and then refining the large-scale production of films, liquids, and other materials. "
The photography business went to the camera folks. (And now the phone folks.) I can see that that would have a leap too far.
But what about semiconductor manufacturing? If they only did optical things, they could be making the sensors for these cameras and the all the led's for lights. Going a little further, they could have been the fab for fabless semiconductor companies.
I actually think Kodak should not be the poster child for what poor choices can do to a good company. Consider Sears. It quit just as Internet shopping was starting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @02:12PM
The linked article addresses this. Semiconductor manufacturing was/is much too different from chemicals that there was no way Kodak was going to be able to leap that chasm.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 25 2019, @04:19PM (2 children)
Which is rather ironic, considering that Sears got it's start in the mail order business. Originally, Sears wasn't especially known for it's quality, but for it's availability, and willingness to ship anywhere. Over the course of a few decades, Sears added the quality and reliability schtick to it's name. When they started diversifying into unrelated stuff, like insurance, they began to lose their quality and reliability edge. If they had just gone back to their original core business of mail order, adapted it to the internet, they probably could have hung on, and competed with the likes of Amazon.
At least, that's how I see it. Differing opinions are welcome!
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday November 26 2019, @03:48AM (1 child)
I still visit Sears at the mall. But haven't bought anything in years. Can't buy anything without getting all tangled up in cash back ( in points ), when points are issued, under what terms and conditions points can be redeemed, on which items they apply to, minimum spend amounts, time deadlines, and whatever more fine print business talk some Sears marketing executive is having a wet dream over.
Meanwhile, I feel on the sucker side of three-card-monte shell games. I get nauseous. But then, I am the least meaningful component of their business model. I am an old coot, raised by parents that bought everything at Sears. By God, wasn't I properly trained to sign and accept terms and conditions?
Then go to Walmart to buy it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:18AM
There is a single word that, when I hear it or think of it, immediately takes me back to my childhood, and the times spent in the Sears clothing section with my mother. Me holding her purse while she holds various pairs of jeans against me to judge the size, uncaring of any preference on my part to be anywhere but there.
The word is: "husky".
(Score: 2) by progo on Monday November 25 2019, @04:19PM (3 children)
If you'd like to read the story without a silent bandwidth crushing video ad playing in the background use this link: https://archive.ph/FYUWA [archive.ph]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @04:47PM
or just disable javascript/run an ad blocker/noscript/whatever
I didn't even know there was video, bandwidth crushing or otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @10:43PM (1 child)
Run NoScript, then there are no silent bandwidth crushing video ads playing in the background
What, you actually engage in "unprotected browsing"?
The only safe way to browse the internet is with protection on (i.e., NoScript).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @03:06AM
Whoah there!
The only safer way. Condoms and noscript aren't infallible. They're good protection if used as directed. But not perfect! They are NOT safe - they are safER.
Just like with sex ed, let's be accurate! Elsewise, young'uns will take us at our word, and be upset if they act safely and get infected, and then stop acting safely.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Tuesday November 26 2019, @03:34PM
The article makes a good point about the "picture business" vs the "chemical business". The film - and - processing business was separate from the camera business, especially in the US (Fuji is such a wide conglomerate that one branch made cameras and another made film). Processing was a completely separate industry - remember the Fotomat booth in "Back To The Future"? (How many readers have never seen one in real life?)