[djtango]

This is a good anecdote and it reminds me of how Sony had cloud architecture/digital distribution, a music label, movie studio, mobile phones, music players, speakers, tvs, laptops, mobile apps... and totally missed out on building Spotify or Netflix.

I do think Google is a little different to Kodak however; their scale and influence is on another level. GSuite, Cloud, YouTube and Android are pretty huge diversifications from Search in my mind even if Search is still the money maker...

[decimalenough]

Sony's Achilles heel was and remains software. You can't build a Spotify or Netflix if you can't build a proper website.

[vel0city]

That, and while Sony had all these big groups they often didn't play nice with each other. Look at how they failed to make Minidisc into any useful data platforms with PCs, largely because MD's were consumer devices and not personal computers so they were pretty much only seen as music hardware.

Even on the few Vaios that had MD drives on them, they're pretty much just an external MD player permanently glued to the device instead of being a full and deeply integrated PC component.

[fragmede]

It goes to internal corporate culture, and what happens to you when you point out an uncomfortable truth. Do we shoot the messenger, or heed her warnings and pivot the hopefully not Titanic? RIM/Blackberry didn't manage to avoid it either.

People like to believe CEOs aren't worth their pay package, and sometimes they're not. But a look at a couple of their failures and a different CEO of Kodak wouldn't have had what happened happen, makes me think that sometimes, some of them do deserve that.

[fennecfoxy]

I firmly believe the majority of CEOs and executives may do something useful (often not) but none of them truly _earn_ their multi-million salaries (for those that are on the modern 100-1000x salaries). It's just suits, handshakes and social connections from certain schools/families. That's all.

Constantly I see them dodging responsibility or resigning (as an "apology") during a crisis they caused and then moving on to the next place they got buddies at for another multi-mil salary.

Many here would defend 'em tho. HN/SV tech people seem to aspire to such things from what I've seen. The rest of us just really think computers are super cool.

[johnecheck]

If the king/ceo is great, autocracy works well.

When a fool inevitably takes the throne, disaster ensues.

I can't say for sure that a different system of government would have saved Kodak. But when one man's choices result in disaster for a massive organization, I don't blame the man. I blame the structure that laid the power to make such a mistake on his shoulders.

[fragmede]

that seems weird. Why hold up one person as being great while not also holding up one person as not? If my leader led me into battle and we were victorious, we'd put it on them. if they lead us to ruin, why should I blame the organizational structure that led to them getting power as the culprit instead of blaming them directly?

[johnecheck]

I'm not saying you'd be wrong to blame the bad leader - just that blaming them doesn't achieve much.

The CEO takes the blame, the board picks a new one (Unless the CEO has special shares that make them impossible to dismiss), and we go on hoping that the king isn't an idiot this time.

My reading of history is that some people are fools - we can blame them for their incompetence or we can set out to build foolproof systems. (Obviously, nothing will be truly foolproof. But we can build systems that are robust against a minority of the population being fools/defectors.)