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by ernestbro 3629 days ago
Thought experiment..even if you could time travel, how would you have saved Kodak?
3 comments

The answer is not to save Kodak, but rather sell the patents and chemicals business, and wind down the photography business in a way that maximises shareholder returns (ie. without ploughing capital into a low margin business like digital cameras, or a business where they had no competitive advantage such as ink jet printers).

Michael Dell received a lot of criticism for saying in the 90s that if he was CEO of Apple he would wind down the company and return capital to shareholders. But far too many CEOs are blind to this option.

The answer to the rhetoric question is probably to invest every earned dollar into Kodak2.0 for 10 or more years, and then hope that "digital" takes off.

As you probably already know, most people would probably rather take the money as long as it comes in instead of making that bet.

Get Dick Merrill in there and take my chances on Kodak being able to make something of the Foveon sensor.

Mind you, at least Sigma managed to get the DP1/2/3M cameras out into the wild, and very nice they are too!