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From the warren buffet autobiography ... “What about Kodak? asked Bill Ruane. He looked back at Gates to see what he would say. “Kodak is toast,” said Gates.8
by afian 10y ago
From the warren buffet autobiography ...
“What about Kodak? asked Bill Ruane. He looked back at Gates to see what he would say.
“Kodak is toast,” said Gates.8
Nobody else in the Buffett Group knew that digital technology would make film cameras toast. In 1991, even Kodak didn’t know that it was toast.9
“Bill probably thinks all the television networks are going to get killed,” said Larry Tisch, whose company, Loews Corp., owned a stake in the CBS network.
“No, it’s not that simple,” said Gates. “The way networks create and expose shows is different than camera film, and nothing is going to come in and fundamentally change that.”
“You’ll see some falloff as people move toward variety, but the networks own the content and they “can repurpose it. The networks face an interesting challenge as we move the transport of TV onto the Internet. But it’s not like photography, where you get rid of film so knowing how to make film becomes absolutely irrelevant."
Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/us/hj_bz.l https://itun.es/us/hj_bz.l
Excerpt From: Schroeder, Alice. “The Snowball.” Bantam Books, 2009. iBooks.
- rahimnathwani 10y agos/autobiography/biography
- porsupah 10y agoEven amongst more technically minded folk, there were some having difficulty accepting that the technical challenges facing digital photography would, in fact, be overcome. Here's quite an interesting thread from rec.photo, Dec 1990 onwards, discussing just that. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.photo/ZnqcQVzAln0 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.photo/ZnqcQVzAln...
- arethuza 10y ago"No doubt, my recent $8000 35mm camera investment was a safe one." Ouch!
- PostOnce 10y agoThey're right, it was 1990. The first DSLR didn't come out for 5 years, and it was less than 2 megapixels. The Nikon D1 didn't come out until 1999, so nine years later, for $6000, for a 2.75mp camera. Did that even compete with film? Can you put that on the cover of a magazine at under 3 megapixels? So yeah, it was a safe investment in 1990.
- CapitalistCartr 10y ago"Right now, 1 Megabyte of memory costs about $45 retail. This will not drop by an order of magnitude in the next decade without a breakthrough, or an economical Gallium-Arsenide process to replace Silicon." I love this line. Even in 1990 people didn't believe Moore's Law.
- zymhan 10y agoAnd yet we still have people who don't think Moore's law will cause us to reach the end of MOSFET at some point.
- fanf2 10y ago1990 was weird for memory prices because they were just recovering from memory shortages and price hikes. See this chart http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm and this newspaper article from the time http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/25/business/shortage-of-chips-is-easing.html http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/25/business/shortage-of-chips...
- 8_hours_ago 10y agoThere's a lot of good gems in there: "Right now, 1 Megabyte of memory costs about $45 retail. This will not drop by an order of magnitude in the next decade without a breakthrough, or an economical Gallium-Arsenide process to replace Silicon." "It's much easier to pass a stack of prints among a group of people than to set up a viewing session on the TV." It makes you wonder what new technologies we dismiss today will actually start a revolution. Of course, not everyone was wrong about the future of digital film; this guy was spot on: "In my opinion, the popularity of electronic camera is dependant upon the popularity of computers. If this so call multimedia become a reality, then more people may want electronic cameras."