Kodak was a chemical company, not a camera company, and the problem was not so much that it would compete with their film business as it was that semiconductors

Kodak was a chemical company, not a camera company, and the problem was not so much that it would compete with their film business as it was that semiconductors and electronics are a very different business. It's one thing to pivot a startup, and another to pivot a beheamoth like the company that Kodak was. And transitioning from one industry to another is a much bigger deal than transitioning from designing x86 CPUs to ARM CPUs. In hindsight, yes, it was a mistake. But it's a very understandable one.