5 ms·

Hearing the name "Kodak" just makes me sad these days. From the wikipedia entry, "From the $90 range in 1997, Kodak shares closed at 76 cents on January 3, 201

by ethbro 11y ago

Hearing the name "Kodak" just makes me sad these days. From the wikipedia entry, "From the $90 range in 1997, Kodak shares closed at 76 cents on January 3, 2012".

drglitch 11y ago
As sad as that is, it's a pretty long life for a company that was killed by mis-management: they invented the digital cameras but chose not to cannibalize their incumbent analog business. To combat demise, they chose to fire people and become an IP shell. Last try at survival was to sell off most/all IP and license its name. The rest is history.
- meric 11y ago
  We weren't in the company. It can be hard to tell. You could open a beauty therapy shop, and it's revenue increase every year, and suddenly after the introduction of cheap laser treatments and race-to-the-bottom competitors, in one year you could face a reduction of 70% of your revenue.[1] [1] Anecdote.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Kodak certainly did a lot of things wrong--especially with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. Part of their problem with digital was that they were arguably ahead of curve (and not quite on the right curve) with things like PhotoCD and providing equipment to photo shops to print customer photos. However, the bottom line is that it would probably have been very difficult for even the most brilliant management to replace the film, photo paper, and chemicals consumables business. That revenue basically doesn't exist in the digital world unless maybe you count inkjet ink--though that's trending down too. Fujifilm did end up doing OK by, among other things, applying their film making expertise to other industries like medical. But they had a tough run too. [1] The film business fell off a cliff that made CD sales look like a gradual decline. [1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/01/how-fujifilm-survived http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/01/how-fujifi...
    - ceratopisan 11y ago
      This bit about replacement of the business is exactly true; most people don't realize Kodak was making digital cameras the whole time film was being replaced. As a purely off-the-cuff guess, I'd bet the entire digital camera industry is smaller than Kodak's film processing work at its peak. I live in Rochester - Kodak was literally one end of the entire city; the scale of the operation was huge. What I regret was that it was a good place to work, though I was never there. Car dealerships would plan annual sales around bonus time at Kodak, and retirees had health care for the rest of their life, for instance.
    - intrasight 11y ago
      I worked at Kodak as a summer intern in '85. Was the era of the disk camera. Was also my first programming job. Lotus 1-2-3. Most people today can't comprehend the scale of American manufacturing as it still was at that time. The Elmgrove plant where I worked (one of a dozen facilities in the Rochester area) has over 14 thousand employees. Our start and end times were staggered in 7 minute increments to manage traffic flow. That none of that would exist 20 years later was inconceivable at the time. The word "disruption" wasn't in business vocabulary. Nor was the phrase "made in China". Some senior technical managers saw the "digital" writing on the wall. But what could they do? What could anyone do? There was no way to turn that aircraft carrier on a dime. There was no business model in digital cameras that would employ 100 thousand engineers, managers, factory workers, technicians, and staff.
      - ghaff 11y ago
        What people don't get a lot of the time when they're opining about what a business should do or should have done because the market is collapsing/collapsed for a particular product category is that you have to run the numbers. Maybe the business executes brilliantly on creating a new $1B business (which is hard). But if that replaces a $10B business, things are still going to get ugly. I don't have the exact numbers at my fingertips but, as I recall, film revenue fell something like 90% in under 10 years. (That said, Fujifilm provides an existence proof that Kodak could have, however painfully, probably navigated this with better management making better choices.)
    - 11y ago
  - ethbro 11y ago
    Of course. Hindsight 20/20, etc. But I feel like if your business is a mature process based around a singular need, having a future disruption department to keep tabs on the market and feed back into high level management should be de rigueur. Innovating amazing and critical components of digital cameras and then spending $5B to buy a drug company in 1988 deserves to get you some future flak on your corporate leadership's decisions.
- fancyketchup 11y ago
  I think you're being more than a little unfair. Part of the problem is that there simply isn't as much money to be made in digital as there was in analog. A digital camera doesn't need film, but film (and film processing) accounted for much of Kodak's profits for many years. So it's not just a simple matter of "make digital cameras instead of analog ones". Also, remember that Kodak was very big into digital imaging, and was considered the leader in the field of high-end digital cameras. That is, until the Nikon D1 came along around 1999. Even then, Kodak sensors were common among the next few generations of DSLRs.
- amyjess 11y ago
  Didn't they also have a stint as a patent troll?
blisterpeanuts 11y ago
I had to read that wikipedia article just to discover that Kodak was still in business, albeit a shrunken shadow of the former colossus that today is a niche player. I grew up with Kodak products -- had a darkroom as a kid and every chemical, every paper, every film was made by Big Yellow. My camera was a Kodak Instamatic. It is sad to see these organizations evaporate from disruption. Progress and all that, but still sad.

by ethbro 11y ago

Hearing the name "Kodak" just makes me sad these days. From the wikipedia entry, "From the $90 range in 1997, Kodak shares closed at 76 cents on January 3, 2012".

drglitch 11y ago

As sad as that is, it's a pretty long life for a company that was killed by mis-management: they invented the digital cameras but chose not to cannibalize their incumbent analog business. To combat demise, they chose to fire people and become an IP shell. Last try at survival was to sell off most/all IP and license its name. The rest is history.

meric 11y ago
We weren't in the company. It can be hard to tell. You could open a beauty therapy shop, and it's revenue increase every year, and suddenly after the introduction of cheap laser treatments and race-to-the-bottom competitors, in one year you could face a reduction of 70% of your revenue.[1] [1] Anecdote.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Kodak certainly did a lot of things wrong--especially with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. Part of their problem with digital was that they were arguably ahead of curve (and not quite on the right curve) with things like PhotoCD and providing equipment to photo shops to print customer photos. However, the bottom line is that it would probably have been very difficult for even the most brilliant management to replace the film, photo paper, and chemicals consumables business. That revenue basically doesn't exist in the digital world unless maybe you count inkjet ink--though that's trending down too. Fujifilm did end up doing OK by, among other things, applying their film making expertise to other industries like medical. But they had a tough run too. [1] The film business fell off a cliff that made CD sales look like a gradual decline. [1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/01/how-fujifilm-survived http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/01/how-fujifi...
  - ceratopisan 11y ago
    This bit about replacement of the business is exactly true; most people don't realize Kodak was making digital cameras the whole time film was being replaced. As a purely off-the-cuff guess, I'd bet the entire digital camera industry is smaller than Kodak's film processing work at its peak. I live in Rochester - Kodak was literally one end of the entire city; the scale of the operation was huge. What I regret was that it was a good place to work, though I was never there. Car dealerships would plan annual sales around bonus time at Kodak, and retirees had health care for the rest of their life, for instance.
  - intrasight 11y ago
    I worked at Kodak as a summer intern in '85. Was the era of the disk camera. Was also my first programming job. Lotus 1-2-3. Most people today can't comprehend the scale of American manufacturing as it still was at that time. The Elmgrove plant where I worked (one of a dozen facilities in the Rochester area) has over 14 thousand employees. Our start and end times were staggered in 7 minute increments to manage traffic flow. That none of that would exist 20 years later was inconceivable at the time. The word "disruption" wasn't in business vocabulary. Nor was the phrase "made in China". Some senior technical managers saw the "digital" writing on the wall. But what could they do? What could anyone do? There was no way to turn that aircraft carrier on a dime. There was no business model in digital cameras that would employ 100 thousand engineers, managers, factory workers, technicians, and staff.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      What people don't get a lot of the time when they're opining about what a business should do or should have done because the market is collapsing/collapsed for a particular product category is that you have to run the numbers. Maybe the business executes brilliantly on creating a new $1B business (which is hard). But if that replaces a $10B business, things are still going to get ugly. I don't have the exact numbers at my fingertips but, as I recall, film revenue fell something like 90% in under 10 years. (That said, Fujifilm provides an existence proof that Kodak could have, however painfully, probably navigated this with better management making better choices.)
  - 11y ago
- ethbro 11y ago
  Of course. Hindsight 20/20, etc. But I feel like if your business is a mature process based around a singular need, having a future disruption department to keep tabs on the market and feed back into high level management should be de rigueur. Innovating amazing and critical components of digital cameras and then spending $5B to buy a drug company in 1988 deserves to get you some future flak on your corporate leadership's decisions.
fancyketchup 11y ago
I think you're being more than a little unfair. Part of the problem is that there simply isn't as much money to be made in digital as there was in analog. A digital camera doesn't need film, but film (and film processing) accounted for much of Kodak's profits for many years. So it's not just a simple matter of "make digital cameras instead of analog ones". Also, remember that Kodak was very big into digital imaging, and was considered the leader in the field of high-end digital cameras. That is, until the Nikon D1 came along around 1999. Even then, Kodak sensors were common among the next few generations of DSLRs.
amyjess 11y ago
Didn't they also have a stint as a patent troll?

blisterpeanuts 11y ago

I had to read that wikipedia article just to discover that Kodak was still in business, albeit a shrunken shadow of the former colossus that today is a niche player. I grew up with Kodak products -- had a darkroom as a kid and every chemical, every paper, every film was made by Big Yellow. My camera was a Kodak Instamatic. It is sad to see these organizations evaporate from disruption. Progress and all that, but still sad.