10 ms·

This is something I'd posted previously on HN: I worked at Kodak as a summer intern in '85. Was the era of the disk camera. Was also my first programming job.

This is something I'd posted previously on HN: 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. At the end of my summer internship, I attended a presentation that our small team gave to more senior managers at the top of Kodak Tower in the conference room adjacent to President Chandler's office. One of the managers took me to the window and pointed out to me different plants and facilities of the vast Kodak empire spread out across the Rochester region. I assumed like many that Kodak had a bright future ahead because they had a world-renowned brand and excellent scientists and engineers. What many at the time didn't yet recognize was that there was no business model in digital cameras that would employ 100 thousand engineers, managers, factory workers, technicians, and staff. There were certainly no senior managers willing or able to sacrifice the golden goose of film to pursue something entirely different.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
The way I remember 1985 is that "made in China" wasn't a phrase but "made in Japan" absolutely was, see forex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_%28film%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_%28film%29 and reckon that that didn't get made in a vacuum.
- rosege 10y ago
  downsizing was also introduced around then - during the time of James Goldsmith and the corporate raiders
- flyinghamster 10y ago
  My own memory of 1985 was that "Made in China" was just starting to get off the ground. Example: at the time, Black & Decker had bought out GE's small home appliance division. I had a Black & Decker-branded hair dryer (that had been a GE product beforehand) and was rather surprised to see "Made in China" on it. I felt it to be a bit ominous even at the time, never mind that products imported from Japan, Taiwan, etc. were already commonplace.
  - starky 10y ago
    According to the data I've seen, the first huge growth in Shenzhen was centered on 1983, with the biggest peak coming around 1991.
- alister 10y ago
  Not only was "made in Japan" established by 1985, but it was already thought to be superior in popular culture: In Back to the Future Part III, Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown--the 1955 version of himself--discovers that the DeLorean time machine car has broken down because of a faulty chip made in 1985. Doc Brown: Unbelievable that this little piece of junk could be such a big problem. No wonder this circuit failed. It says, "Made in Japan." Marty McFly: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan."
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - rasz_pl 10y ago
    That might be a cute joke, but a better indication would be VHS camera used in the first Back to the future movie - 1984 made in Japan JVC GR-C1. The cool innovative tech gizmo wasnt US made.
- flukus 10y ago
  I think it was "made in Taiwan" around then. Japan was a rich, developed nation and investment into China proper hadn't really started.
- bostik 10y ago
  There was another one: "made in Hong Kong". I remember seeing that in various things, ever since my father pointed it out. It was common enough to exist in daily lingo. Most of the time it was a synonym for cheap knock-offs.
  - smcl 10y ago
    I also remember seeing "Made in Macau" on the bottom of little toy cars I played with when I was a kid, as well as other cheap toys and things. Bit of a contrast to today where Macau is the Vegas of the east
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Macau didn't seem to be a big player relatively: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=made+in+China%2Cmade+in+Japan%2Cmade+in+Taiwan%2Cmade+in+Hong+Kong%2Cmade+in+Macau&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20China%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20China%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20China%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20china%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20CHINA%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20JAPAN%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20In%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20japan%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20Taiwan%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20Taiwan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20Taiwan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20TAIWAN%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20Hong%20Kong%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20Hong%20Kong%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20Hong%20Kong%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20HONG%20KONG%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cmade%20in%20Macau%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=made+in+China%...
    - grkvlt 10y ago
      Macau has been the Vegas of the East (or, the Monte Carlo of the East) for a long time - Portugal made gambling legal there in 1850 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_Macau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_Macau
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  This probably isn't the most valid use of Google's Ngram viewer, but it looks as if "Made in Japan" started taking off about 1980, "Made in Taiwan" slightly earlier, but on a lower trajectory, and "Made in China" really in 1993. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=made+in+China%2Cmade+in+Japan%2Cmade+in+Taiwan&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20China%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20China%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20China%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20china%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20CHINA%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20JAPAN%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20In%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20japan%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20Taiwan%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20Taiwan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20Taiwan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20TAIWAN%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=made+in+China%...
  - grkvlt 10y ago
    It is interesting though. I wonder why Japan peaked in 1991? Perhaps as simple as the start of the Chinese ascendancy in exports, and from then onwards 'Made in China' just gradually replaced 'Made in Japan' for the pejorative sense of the phrase, which is why it has now returned to pre-1980 levels, which would be a simple factual usage of the phrase?
    - mateo411 10y ago
      The Japanese economy went into a big recession in the early 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)
tim333 10y ago
>What could anyone do? One of the best discussions of this kind of issue I've read was Warren Buffet on the shutdown of Berkshire Hathaway's textile business. Berkshire was a textile business when he bought it which faced a decline similar to that of Kodak's film business. His answer, to reallocate capital to completely different businesses that were healthy. It was kind of what Fuji did when they switched from film to cosmetics and Buffett's reallocations allowed Berkshire to do very well rather than going bust. The discussion is in the 85 letter if you scroll down to "Shutdown of Textile Business." http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html
- sedachv 10y ago
  That is my favorite piece of Buffet's writing, for a different reason: > Over the years, we had the option of making large capital expenditures in the textile operation that would have allowed us to somewhat reduce variable costs. Each proposal to do so looked like an immediate winner. > But the promised benefits from these textile investments were illusory. Many of our competitors, both domestic and foreign, were stepping up to the same kind of expenditures and, once enough companies did so, their reduced costs became the baseline for reduced prices industrywide. This is a great illustration of why capitalism is not inherently innovational. If it is cheaper to exploit workers than to automate, the market will exploit workers instead of automating. I am not so sure Kodak had any other developed businesses where they could have re-allocated so much capital. Something similar seems to be happening with Yahoo now.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    In a sense they did - with Eastman Chemicals, which was also founded by George Eastman and which was spun off in 1994? It is a Fortune 500 company with around 20,000 employees.
    - VLM 10y ago
      One way to survive international competition is to ship heavy bulk stuff. I clicked around Eastman's site and reading between the lines their revenue is about $9B and figure a buck per pound accurate to one sig fig so they're shipping maybe ten billion pounds of product annually. Now China's entire export economy to the entire world is only thirty-something million TEU annually. Figure 50K pounds cargo per TEU and compare, and if I did the math right in my head, one obscure lube oil and plastic resin company sells about 1% of China's total worldwide export capacity. (All of the above is accurate to about one sig fig, and if China has finally topped 40 megaTEU thats all very nice but doesn't fundamentally change the conclusion anyway) I mean, that's not realistic to ship across the planet, just too much of it, too heavy, global shipping isn't "big enough" to eat low value product. Now something high value per pound like photographic film, Kodak would be out of business today in the USA anyway even if film were still in business. Ready to use photo film has a high enough dollar per pound density to be worth shipping across the world.
maxwell 10y ago
> But what could they do? Could they have bought NeXT in the mid '90s? Then maybe we'd all be walking around with a "smartcam" that also makes calls.
- T0T0R0 10y ago
  I mean, yeah, coulda, woulda, shoulda... but those sorts of alternate histories require some kind of A Priori knowledge that NeXT might become an incredible company, beyond that, augmenting the path of a company like NeXT will contaminate the timeline, provoking unpredictable ripple effects in the subsequent continuum. If Skynet kills John Connor, what will the machine world look like? What happens if Marty listens to Needles, and accepts his dare again??? (: Without divining, based on now-known realities, that they had no insight into, what could have been done? Apple's total disintegration isn't entirely imaginable at this precise moment, but planning for some dreaded rainy day, what disaster strategies could they use to anticipate a total failure of their bread and butter? Microsoft probably IS facing this scenario. What can they do?
  - leoc 10y ago
    Also: rich uncle Xerox did own PARC, and it didn't end up saving the company.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      I was somewhat staggered in the late 1990s reading John Sealy Brown (former PARC director), in The Social Life of Information, which is otherwise and excellent book and one I'd still recommend, that the grand-daddy of technical reproduction businesses completely failed to mention its biggest competitor, the Apache Webserver, anywhere in the book (there was brief mention of the World Wide Web). I've worked with some of Xerox's workhorse printers, multi-hundred-thousand-dollar systems that can crank out 120 prints per minute, sustained (hot-swappable paper trays, so you don't even have to stop to reload). But all of those were already being dwarfed in document presentation by a freely-available arrangement of software, with a $1,000 - $10,000 piece of server kit capable of kicking out millions of pages per day. A large print shop with several workhorse printers might make 1 million copies/day. And at a fraction the cost. Yeah, Xerox completely dropped the ball.
thisjustinm 10y ago
> Most people today can't comprehend the scale of American manufacturing as it still was at that time. This. During my seven years at the Windsor, CO Kodak plant (see my other comment below for more) it was crazy to hear of the heyday (I was there 2002-2009, not the heyday). It was the 2nd largest Kodak manufacturing center (bested only by Rochester) and built in the 60s. It was a sprawling campus of huge concrete buildings with almost no windows (great for film!). The campus had it's own fire department and power plant. It was a ghost of it's former self when I started but by the time I left entire buildings were vacant. At it's peak the plant had 3,200 employees. A lot of people there had worked in Rochester and from their stories I could hardly fathom the manufacturing operation there being so much larger than ours. Maybe that's part of the reason Kodak moved so slow - all those buildings and people and essentially small factory cities are not something you can change overnight.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  There are still big plants in the US. The Volkswagen plant in South East Tennessee (thought nowhere near the scale of the plant you mentioned). But they do exist in China. Plants in some cities dump sludge into wastelands the size of lakes. Some factories are small towns unto themselves where people work, sleep and live on company property. We still need to the scale Kodak had for their market at the time, but economics has moved it overseas and the market is totally different. It's still consumerism though, and a frightening scale. It's just abstracted away from most of the western world, so we don't see it.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    Also notable that manufacturing at scale (including Kodak) has the side effect of leaving behind environmentally problematic Superfund sites. There's no way you're ever going to be able to compete with someone willing and able to externalize more costs than you.
  - starky 10y ago
    It isn't that some factories have people work, sleep, and live there, that is the standard of how factories operate over there. Most workers are from outside of the area, so they provide all this for them in addition to pay that they send back to the family in other provinces. Even the engineers I've worked with at these companies often live in the dorms during the week, even though they may have apartments elsewhere.
etangent 10y ago
> What many at the time didn't yet recognize was that there was no business model in digital cameras that would employ 100 thousand engineers, managers, factory workers, technicians, and staff I believe you meant to say "that there was a business model".
- intrasight 10y ago
  No, I really meant "there was no business model". The film and film cameras supported many of those hundred thousand employees. Let's assume that 30K of them were in the film camera areas. Kodak, as a company that markets digital cameras built in China, would support perhaps 1000 employees in that endevour. A big drop. What Kodak ended up doing mostly was just license the brand name. Probably didn't even need 1000 employees for that.
- ernestbro 10y ago
  Kodak failed because the entire verticalized printed photo industry was demonetized. It's the same way the newspaper industry has shrunk: yes people still take pictures and read news, no there isn't an obvious way for large companies to extract value as there used to be. Printing chemicals and large printing presses are very expensive and hard to reproduce, meanwhile while digital comes along and easily replaces them. And if Instagram dies 10 others can take their place.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

The way I remember 1985 is that "made in China" wasn't a phrase but "made in Japan" absolutely was, see forex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_%28film%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_%28film%29 and reckon that that didn't get made in a vacuum.

rosege 10y ago
downsizing was also introduced around then - during the time of James Goldsmith and the corporate raiders
flyinghamster 10y ago
My own memory of 1985 was that "Made in China" was just starting to get off the ground. Example: at the time, Black & Decker had bought out GE's small home appliance division. I had a Black & Decker-branded hair dryer (that had been a GE product beforehand) and was rather surprised to see "Made in China" on it. I felt it to be a bit ominous even at the time, never mind that products imported from Japan, Taiwan, etc. were already commonplace.
- starky 10y ago
  According to the data I've seen, the first huge growth in Shenzhen was centered on 1983, with the biggest peak coming around 1991.
alister 10y ago
Not only was "made in Japan" established by 1985, but it was already thought to be superior in popular culture: In Back to the Future Part III, Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown--the 1955 version of himself--discovers that the DeLorean time machine car has broken down because of a faulty chip made in 1985. Doc Brown: Unbelievable that this little piece of junk could be such a big problem. No wonder this circuit failed. It says, "Made in Japan." Marty McFly: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan."
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- rasz_pl 10y ago
  That might be a cute joke, but a better indication would be VHS camera used in the first Back to the future movie - 1984 made in Japan JVC GR-C1. The cool innovative tech gizmo wasnt US made.
flukus 10y ago
I think it was "made in Taiwan" around then. Japan was a rich, developed nation and investment into China proper hadn't really started.
bostik 10y ago
There was another one: "made in Hong Kong". I remember seeing that in various things, ever since my father pointed it out. It was common enough to exist in daily lingo. Most of the time it was a synonym for cheap knock-offs.
- smcl 10y ago
  I also remember seeing "Made in Macau" on the bottom of little toy cars I played with when I was a kid, as well as other cheap toys and things. Bit of a contrast to today where Macau is the Vegas of the east
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Macau didn't seem to be a big player relatively: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=made+in+China%2Cmade+in+Japan%2Cmade+in+Taiwan%2Cmade+in+Hong+Kong%2Cmade+in+Macau&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20China%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20China%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20China%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20china%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20CHINA%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20JAPAN%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20In%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20japan%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20Taiwan%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20Taiwan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20Taiwan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20TAIWAN%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20Hong%20Kong%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20Hong%20Kong%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20Hong%20Kong%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20HONG%20KONG%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cmade%20in%20Macau%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=made+in+China%...
  - grkvlt 10y ago
    Macau has been the Vegas of the East (or, the Monte Carlo of the East) for a long time - Portugal made gambling legal there in 1850 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_Macau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_Macau
dredmorbius 10y ago
This probably isn't the most valid use of Google's Ngram viewer, but it looks as if "Made in Japan" started taking off about 1980, "Made in Taiwan" slightly earlier, but on a lower trajectory, and "Made in China" really in 1993. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=made+in+China%2Cmade+in+Japan%2Cmade+in+Taiwan&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20China%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20China%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20China%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20china%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20CHINA%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20JAPAN%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20In%20Japan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20japan%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cmade%20in%20Taiwan%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmade%20in%20Taiwan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMade%20in%20Taiwan%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMADE%20IN%20TAIWAN%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=made+in+China%...
- grkvlt 10y ago
  It is interesting though. I wonder why Japan peaked in 1991? Perhaps as simple as the start of the Chinese ascendancy in exports, and from then onwards 'Made in China' just gradually replaced 'Made in Japan' for the pejorative sense of the phrase, which is why it has now returned to pre-1980 levels, which would be a simple factual usage of the phrase?
  - mateo411 10y ago
    The Japanese economy went into a big recession in the early 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)

tim333 10y ago

>What could anyone do? One of the best discussions of this kind of issue I've read was Warren Buffet on the shutdown of Berkshire Hathaway's textile business. Berkshire was a textile business when he bought it which faced a decline similar to that of Kodak's film business. His answer, to reallocate capital to completely different businesses that were healthy. It was kind of what Fuji did when they switched from film to cosmetics and Buffett's reallocations allowed Berkshire to do very well rather than going bust. The discussion is in the 85 letter if you scroll down to "Shutdown of Textile Business." http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html

sedachv 10y ago
That is my favorite piece of Buffet's writing, for a different reason: > Over the years, we had the option of making large capital expenditures in the textile operation that would have allowed us to somewhat reduce variable costs. Each proposal to do so looked like an immediate winner. > But the promised benefits from these textile investments were illusory. Many of our competitors, both domestic and foreign, were stepping up to the same kind of expenditures and, once enough companies did so, their reduced costs became the baseline for reduced prices industrywide. This is a great illustration of why capitalism is not inherently innovational. If it is cheaper to exploit workers than to automate, the market will exploit workers instead of automating. I am not so sure Kodak had any other developed businesses where they could have re-allocated so much capital. Something similar seems to be happening with Yahoo now.
- intrasight 10y ago
  In a sense they did - with Eastman Chemicals, which was also founded by George Eastman and which was spun off in 1994? It is a Fortune 500 company with around 20,000 employees.
  - VLM 10y ago
    One way to survive international competition is to ship heavy bulk stuff. I clicked around Eastman's site and reading between the lines their revenue is about $9B and figure a buck per pound accurate to one sig fig so they're shipping maybe ten billion pounds of product annually. Now China's entire export economy to the entire world is only thirty-something million TEU annually. Figure 50K pounds cargo per TEU and compare, and if I did the math right in my head, one obscure lube oil and plastic resin company sells about 1% of China's total worldwide export capacity. (All of the above is accurate to about one sig fig, and if China has finally topped 40 megaTEU thats all very nice but doesn't fundamentally change the conclusion anyway) I mean, that's not realistic to ship across the planet, just too much of it, too heavy, global shipping isn't "big enough" to eat low value product. Now something high value per pound like photographic film, Kodak would be out of business today in the USA anyway even if film were still in business. Ready to use photo film has a high enough dollar per pound density to be worth shipping across the world.

maxwell 10y ago

> But what could they do? Could they have bought NeXT in the mid '90s? Then maybe we'd all be walking around with a "smartcam" that also makes calls.

T0T0R0 10y ago
I mean, yeah, coulda, woulda, shoulda... but those sorts of alternate histories require some kind of A Priori knowledge that NeXT might become an incredible company, beyond that, augmenting the path of a company like NeXT will contaminate the timeline, provoking unpredictable ripple effects in the subsequent continuum. If Skynet kills John Connor, what will the machine world look like? What happens if Marty listens to Needles, and accepts his dare again??? (: Without divining, based on now-known realities, that they had no insight into, what could have been done? Apple's total disintegration isn't entirely imaginable at this precise moment, but planning for some dreaded rainy day, what disaster strategies could they use to anticipate a total failure of their bread and butter? Microsoft probably IS facing this scenario. What can they do?
- leoc 10y ago
  Also: rich uncle Xerox did own PARC, and it didn't end up saving the company.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    I was somewhat staggered in the late 1990s reading John Sealy Brown (former PARC director), in The Social Life of Information, which is otherwise and excellent book and one I'd still recommend, that the grand-daddy of technical reproduction businesses completely failed to mention its biggest competitor, the Apache Webserver, anywhere in the book (there was brief mention of the World Wide Web). I've worked with some of Xerox's workhorse printers, multi-hundred-thousand-dollar systems that can crank out 120 prints per minute, sustained (hot-swappable paper trays, so you don't even have to stop to reload). But all of those were already being dwarfed in document presentation by a freely-available arrangement of software, with a $1,000 - $10,000 piece of server kit capable of kicking out millions of pages per day. A large print shop with several workhorse printers might make 1 million copies/day. And at a fraction the cost. Yeah, Xerox completely dropped the ball.

thisjustinm 10y ago

> Most people today can't comprehend the scale of American manufacturing as it still was at that time. This. During my seven years at the Windsor, CO Kodak plant (see my other comment below for more) it was crazy to hear of the heyday (I was there 2002-2009, not the heyday). It was the 2nd largest Kodak manufacturing center (bested only by Rochester) and built in the 60s. It was a sprawling campus of huge concrete buildings with almost no windows (great for film!). The campus had it's own fire department and power plant. It was a ghost of it's former self when I started but by the time I left entire buildings were vacant. At it's peak the plant had 3,200 employees. A lot of people there had worked in Rochester and from their stories I could hardly fathom the manufacturing operation there being so much larger than ours. Maybe that's part of the reason Kodak moved so slow - all those buildings and people and essentially small factory cities are not something you can change overnight.

djsumdog 10y ago
There are still big plants in the US. The Volkswagen plant in South East Tennessee (thought nowhere near the scale of the plant you mentioned). But they do exist in China. Plants in some cities dump sludge into wastelands the size of lakes. Some factories are small towns unto themselves where people work, sleep and live on company property. We still need to the scale Kodak had for their market at the time, but economics has moved it overseas and the market is totally different. It's still consumerism though, and a frightening scale. It's just abstracted away from most of the western world, so we don't see it.
- ethbro 10y ago
  Also notable that manufacturing at scale (including Kodak) has the side effect of leaving behind environmentally problematic Superfund sites. There's no way you're ever going to be able to compete with someone willing and able to externalize more costs than you.
- starky 10y ago
  It isn't that some factories have people work, sleep, and live there, that is the standard of how factories operate over there. Most workers are from outside of the area, so they provide all this for them in addition to pay that they send back to the family in other provinces. Even the engineers I've worked with at these companies often live in the dorms during the week, even though they may have apartments elsewhere.

etangent 10y ago

> What many at the time didn't yet recognize was that there was no business model in digital cameras that would employ 100 thousand engineers, managers, factory workers, technicians, and staff I believe you meant to say "that there was a business model".

intrasight 10y ago
No, I really meant "there was no business model". The film and film cameras supported many of those hundred thousand employees. Let's assume that 30K of them were in the film camera areas. Kodak, as a company that markets digital cameras built in China, would support perhaps 1000 employees in that endevour. A big drop. What Kodak ended up doing mostly was just license the brand name. Probably didn't even need 1000 employees for that.
ernestbro 10y ago
Kodak failed because the entire verticalized printed photo industry was demonetized. It's the same way the newspaper industry has shrunk: yes people still take pictures and read news, no there isn't an obvious way for large companies to extract value as there used to be. Printing chemicals and large printing presses are very expensive and hard to reproduce, meanwhile while digital comes along and easily replaces them. And if Instagram dies 10 others can take their place.