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In the summer of '84, I did an internship at Kodak. My father had warned me when I was approved that I'd probably be driving a fork lift. But because I knew my

In the summer of '84, I did an internship at Kodak. My father had warned me when I was approved that I'd probably be driving a fork lift. But because I knew my way around a computer, they had me work in accounting doing Lotus 123 development - my first programming job! While there, my boss took me on a plant tour in the building where they were making disk cameras, which was the big thing in the early 80s. The tour and factory were amazing. Even with all the automation, there were still a lot of people. And the biggest machines I had ever seen - especially the presses. This was shortly before the very steep decline in Kokak's business. That year there were over 14,000 employees working just at that one facility (Elmgrove). Our start and end times were staggered in 5 minute increments to manage traffic flow. Kodak now employs only about 5000 worldwide. Kodak famously invented the digital camera around 1975. But they failed to envision a future without film. https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/money/business/2022/02/07/kodak-disc-camera-photo-quality-boor-but-25-m-were-sold/6668164001/ https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/money/business/20... https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/kodaks-first-digital-moment/ https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/kodaks-first-digit...

fortran77 5y ago
I also worked for film companies (Konica/Chemco http://wikimapia.org/25175058/Old-Powers-Chemco-Plant http://wikimapia.org/25175058/Old-Powers-Chemco-Plant) and I was involved in digital photography (I was on the Adobe Photoshop team up to version 5). > But they failed to envision a future without film. I'm not sure this is true. I think Kodak had no way of salvaging their business. They used to make a dime every time someone pressed the shutter on a camera. That type of revenue stream simply doesn't exist. Of course, they could have become a completely different company, but there was no one company that dominated photography in the post-film world.
- intrasight 5y ago
  Both are true. A dime per click wasn't going to happen. But their collective denial about the impending demise of film as a multi-billion dollar business is a textbook case of bad management. They made an effort to be a major cloud SaaS for photography, but it was too little to late.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  From what I have heard Kodak was mainly a chemicals company - and making and selling film obviously sold and used more chemicals. They definitely screwed up not developing the digital camera more - does not make sense to me why they even invested the money developing one in the first place.
  - philipkglass 5y ago
    Kodak spun off Eastman Chemical Company in 1994. It continues to operate a successful chemicals business. It's now bigger (employees, revenue) than its former parent. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/EMN/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/EMN/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/KODK/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/KODK/
paulmd 5y ago
> Kodak famously invented the digital camera around 1975. But they failed to envision a future without film. What would you have even put a photo onto to view it in 1975? A television I guess - at 320x240 NTSC resolution. Which is wildly inferior to an actual photograph in terms of quality at that time (35mm negatives are around 20 megapixels at 75 lp/mm). How would you have distributed it? Photo CD? CDs weren't standardized for another 5 years. Laserdisc I guess? Not standard equipment for anyone at the time (even leaving aside that nobody had PCs either). In 1975, the market for digital photography would have consisted of: satellite reconnaissance, military applications, and wire-service news photography. Military applications and wire-service being large fixed-installation cameras and not a SLR format. Bear in mind, this is what a digital camera looked like in 1991, let alone in 1975: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS_100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS_100 Blasting Kodak for "not envisioning a future without film" in 1975 is like blasting IBM for not envisioning the personal computer in 1950. They were correct that the worldwide market for computers didn't exist at that time. And when the opportunity came to pivot - like the DCS-100 - they largely did. The military were early adopters of that for special operations teams for example. What they didn't do was dive into consumer photography aggressively in the early 00s. And I'm sure that seemed like a reasonable business decision at the time: margins were much lower for consumer gear than professional, and kodak was not really a semiconductor firm. Anyway, "kodak could have become kings of digital photography!" is one of those bits that has just sunk into the pop-culture psyche but isn't really true at all. Much like the IBM "there is only a worldwide market for five computers" line - they actually were right at the time they made that observation. The real problem was that when the time was right they were too blinded by their higher-margin businesses to pivot, but 1975 was not it. The world was nowhere near ready for consumer digital photography in 1975 and it doesn't even pass the smell test that it might possibly have been. There's about another five technologies you really needed before digital photography could have become a thing commercially let alone viable for consumers.
- intrasight 5y ago
  Everything you say is true - and doesn't conflict with what I had said. Look at the second link I had posted originally. It has a nice photo of that first digital camera. I was built by a 24 year old new hire: "Soon after arriving at Kodak, Mr. Sasson was given a seemingly unimportant task — to see whether there was any practical use for a charged coupled device (C.C.D.), which had been invented a few years earlier."
jrjarrett 5y ago
I worked at KAD for the first 7 years of my 16 years at Kodak; I was in IT, thought.

fortran77 5y ago

I also worked for film companies (Konica/Chemco http://wikimapia.org/25175058/Old-Powers-Chemco-Plant http://wikimapia.org/25175058/Old-Powers-Chemco-Plant) and I was involved in digital photography (I was on the Adobe Photoshop team up to version 5). > But they failed to envision a future without film. I'm not sure this is true. I think Kodak had no way of salvaging their business. They used to make a dime every time someone pressed the shutter on a camera. That type of revenue stream simply doesn't exist. Of course, they could have become a completely different company, but there was no one company that dominated photography in the post-film world.

intrasight 5y ago
Both are true. A dime per click wasn't going to happen. But their collective denial about the impending demise of film as a multi-billion dollar business is a textbook case of bad management. They made an effort to be a major cloud SaaS for photography, but it was too little to late.
Melatonic 5y ago
From what I have heard Kodak was mainly a chemicals company - and making and selling film obviously sold and used more chemicals. They definitely screwed up not developing the digital camera more - does not make sense to me why they even invested the money developing one in the first place.
- philipkglass 5y ago
  Kodak spun off Eastman Chemical Company in 1994. It continues to operate a successful chemicals business. It's now bigger (employees, revenue) than its former parent. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/EMN/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/EMN/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/KODK/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/KODK/

paulmd 5y ago

> Kodak famously invented the digital camera around 1975. But they failed to envision a future without film. What would you have even put a photo onto to view it in 1975? A television I guess - at 320x240 NTSC resolution. Which is wildly inferior to an actual photograph in terms of quality at that time (35mm negatives are around 20 megapixels at 75 lp/mm). How would you have distributed it? Photo CD? CDs weren't standardized for another 5 years. Laserdisc I guess? Not standard equipment for anyone at the time (even leaving aside that nobody had PCs either). In 1975, the market for digital photography would have consisted of: satellite reconnaissance, military applications, and wire-service news photography. Military applications and wire-service being large fixed-installation cameras and not a SLR format. Bear in mind, this is what a digital camera looked like in 1991, let alone in 1975: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS_100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS_100 Blasting Kodak for "not envisioning a future without film" in 1975 is like blasting IBM for not envisioning the personal computer in 1950. They were correct that the worldwide market for computers didn't exist at that time. And when the opportunity came to pivot - like the DCS-100 - they largely did. The military were early adopters of that for special operations teams for example. What they didn't do was dive into consumer photography aggressively in the early 00s. And I'm sure that seemed like a reasonable business decision at the time: margins were much lower for consumer gear than professional, and kodak was not really a semiconductor firm. Anyway, "kodak could have become kings of digital photography!" is one of those bits that has just sunk into the pop-culture psyche but isn't really true at all. Much like the IBM "there is only a worldwide market for five computers" line - they actually were right at the time they made that observation. The real problem was that when the time was right they were too blinded by their higher-margin businesses to pivot, but 1975 was not it. The world was nowhere near ready for consumer digital photography in 1975 and it doesn't even pass the smell test that it might possibly have been. There's about another five technologies you really needed before digital photography could have become a thing commercially let alone viable for consumers.

intrasight 5y ago
Everything you say is true - and doesn't conflict with what I had said. Look at the second link I had posted originally. It has a nice photo of that first digital camera. I was built by a 24 year old new hire: "Soon after arriving at Kodak, Mr. Sasson was given a seemingly unimportant task — to see whether there was any practical use for a charged coupled device (C.C.D.), which had been invented a few years earlier."

jrjarrett 5y ago

I worked at KAD for the first 7 years of my 16 years at Kodak; I was in IT, thought.