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You're still selling movies and cameras. If we take this approach EVERYBODY has pivoted. Walmart has online sales that are "eating into" their in store sales.

You're still selling movies and cameras. If we take this approach EVERYBODY has pivoted. Walmart has online sales that are "eating into" their in store sales. CVS has home delivery, eating into their foot traffic...

Retric 5y ago
Kodak actually pivoted to making pharmaceuticals. That leveraged what they where actually good at, high precision chemical manufacturing. Survivorship bias means you see a lot of company’s that have successfully pivoted, and the brands that failed often get bought up after the fact.
vidarh 5y ago
I think Netflix is more of an argument than Kodak. Netflix kept selling access to movies, though the way they did so changed dramatically. But while Kodak did sell cameras, Kodak sold cameras mostly to drive sales of their film. The film and chemicals were their high margin product ranges. The pivot to try to drive their earnings mainly from their cameras was a fundamental change of business model in a way that Netflix shift to streaming (or Walmart or CVS online and delivery) wasn't. It turned a long term recurring high-margin revenue stream into a punctuated low-margin revenue stream. (not that they could have prevented the eventual collapse of their film business)
Jensson 5y ago
> You're still selling movies and cameras. That doesn't matter, the organization is the people in it, if you have to make huge reorganizations in what the people at your company do then that is a huge pivot that is dangerous and likely to fail. Digital companies are not like other companies, you are thinking of companies where brands is the main thing and you can just slap together a new product in a year. It doesn't work like that in normal businesses, Kodak couldn't just say that all their factories specialized on making goods related to old cameras be repurposed to digital cameras. Some of the expertise can transfer over, but if that is not your competitive advantage it doesn't matter. Kodaks competitive advantage was not camera lenses etc, so they had no way to pivot to digital cameras. Digital cameras destroyed the business they were good at. > If we take this approach EVERYBODY has pivoted. Walmart has online sales that are "eating into" their in store sales. CVS has home delivery, eating into their foot traffic... No, not everybody has pivoted. Lots of companies failed to pivot and died. Walmart is aware of this and has started to build expertise around digital sales already, because Walmart doesn't want to die in case digital sales overtakes physical sales.

Retric 5y ago

Kodak actually pivoted to making pharmaceuticals. That leveraged what they where actually good at, high precision chemical manufacturing. Survivorship bias means you see a lot of company’s that have successfully pivoted, and the brands that failed often get bought up after the fact.

vidarh 5y ago

I think Netflix is more of an argument than Kodak. Netflix kept selling access to movies, though the way they did so changed dramatically. But while Kodak did sell cameras, Kodak sold cameras mostly to drive sales of their film. The film and chemicals were their high margin product ranges. The pivot to try to drive their earnings mainly from their cameras was a fundamental change of business model in a way that Netflix shift to streaming (or Walmart or CVS online and delivery) wasn't. It turned a long term recurring high-margin revenue stream into a punctuated low-margin revenue stream. (not that they could have prevented the eventual collapse of their film business)

Jensson 5y ago

> You're still selling movies and cameras. That doesn't matter, the organization is the people in it, if you have to make huge reorganizations in what the people at your company do then that is a huge pivot that is dangerous and likely to fail. Digital companies are not like other companies, you are thinking of companies where brands is the main thing and you can just slap together a new product in a year. It doesn't work like that in normal businesses, Kodak couldn't just say that all their factories specialized on making goods related to old cameras be repurposed to digital cameras. Some of the expertise can transfer over, but if that is not your competitive advantage it doesn't matter. Kodaks competitive advantage was not camera lenses etc, so they had no way to pivot to digital cameras. Digital cameras destroyed the business they were good at. > If we take this approach EVERYBODY has pivoted. Walmart has online sales that are "eating into" their in store sales. CVS has home delivery, eating into their foot traffic... No, not everybody has pivoted. Lots of companies failed to pivot and died. Walmart is aware of this and has started to build expertise around digital sales already, because Walmart doesn't want to die in case digital sales overtakes physical sales.