I worked in the retail end of the film business as a kid, and I've thought about this a bit since I lived through it. I really don't think the modern world has

I worked in the retail end of the film business as a kid, and I've thought about this a bit since I lived through it. I really don't think the modern world has a place for Kodak as an imaging company anymore no matter what they would have done. In the old days, the medium was film and paper. If you wanted to capture an image, it had to be on film, and distributed on film or paper for people to see. Every film in every theater in the world had to be printed on film and then physically handled. It must have been tens of thousands of miles of film just for the average movie. And I'm given to believe that it was a large margin business. With digital cameras, all that went away; you no longer needed to develop/print things to see them, and it's become a specialized service that you might use to commemorate a special occasion. Every grocery store used to have a lab, but it's been at least a decade since they were taken out in all my local ones. I wonder how many people even own a "camera" anymore? At one point, I carried a film camera everywhere, and then a digital point and shoot, but the iPhone 4 is where I decided that it had crossed a line that the convenience and quality of the built-in camera meant I no longer wanted to carry a specialized device (though the point and shoots of the day where clearly still superior). And the phone cameras today are better still. Now, dedicated cameras are the stuff of hobbyists (I have a few and they are still impressive), but it's a niche thing compared to the world of film and paper. And so I wonder if those old guys at Kodak had some sense of what it would mean to get rid of film and just tried to hold on for as long as they could.