[moomin]

It’s sad to see. As I understand it, digital photography forced camera companies to decide if they were principally about film or about photos and imaging. The competition in the image space was brutal, which phones winning the mass market by a huge margin. Those that quietly moved into recondite but valuable areas of technical specialisation did much better, but they’re not camera companies anymore.

[kjellsbells]

Kodak's failure to capitalize on their invention of the digital camera is so often cited as the cause of their downfall that it has taken on the air of truth. Whether it really was the cause of their demise or not, I'm not so sure. Suppose theyd come out with a line of digital cameras. Would that have saved them? That seems unlikely.

Looking around at similar companies, Nikon and Zeiss became specialist lens makers, for (eg) medical devices, specialist optics like binoculars, and yes, phones. Fuji got into medical imaging, x rays etc. Its almost like they all realized they were in the image business but in different ways.

One peer I find especially interesting is Corning as they were a similar one-trick pony (glass) in upstate New York. But Corning survived, and Kodak didnt. Gorilla glass for phones, fiber optics, etc are a million miles away from pyrex and labware. Why were Corning able to pivot and thrive, and not Kodak?

[myrmidon]

One important point I think is that Kodak, at its core, was a huge company specialized in photography related chemistry.

Not easy to turn a company around when the knowledge/qualifications/experience of most of your employees becomes almost worthless.

Thats also what made it easier for others (like Corning) to pivot (presumably).

[philipkglass]

Kodak spun off the chemical business as Eastman Chemical Company in 1994, seven years before the main film business went into permanent decline:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Chemical_Company

Eastman Chemical Company is still doing fine.

[i_am_proteus]

Fujifilm recognized that they were a chemistry company and partially pivoted to cosmetics.

[NaOH]

There's a good, short 2012 Economist piece on how Fuji recognized its underlying strengths (chemistry company) better than Kodak, and made that part of their strategy since they recognized digital photography would not last.

https://archive.is/20250424104926/https://www.economist.com/...

[Metacelsus]

They also make cell culture material for bio labs: https://fujifilmbiosciences.fujifilm.com/us

[seanhunter]

Kodak give the world the first digital camera[1]. It took mismanagement on a gargantuan scale for them to fail in this manner.

[1] https://www.kodak.com/en/company/page/photography-history/

[bbatha]

Kodak managed the film and camera market about as well as they could. The mismanagement was a failure to diversify. The total digital camera market excluding cell phones, would be a fraction of Kodak's film business back in the film era. The film and camera story is a popular one but is fundamentally wrong. The shrinkage of the camera/film market was inevitable. You can look at Fujifilm who does sell cameras and basically owns the remaining film market with instax, however neither of those sustain the business they are effectively a chemical and medical manufacturer who dabbles in photography now.

Kodak on the other hand attempted to diversify to those markets in the 80s and 90s but made some terrible investments that they managed poorly. That forced them to leave those markets and double down on film just in time for the point and shoot boom of the 90s and the early digital market. Kodak was a heavy player in the digital camera market up to the cell phone era: they had the first dSLR and were the dSLR market for most of the 90s, they had the first commercially successful lines of digital point and shoots, they had the first full frame dSLR in the early 00s and jockeyed for positions 1-3 in the point and shoot market until the smart phone era. They continued to make CCD sensors for everyone during this time. Ya they missed the CMOS change over and smarthphone sensor market, but that was well after they were already in the drain.

[heeton]

We all know that being first does not mean success, and it’s not “gargantuan” mismanagement.

It’s rare to be first AND the leader 20 years later.

[CamperBob2]

That was in 1975. It took multiple decades for digital camera technology to become cheap and practical for the mass consumer market, and another decade or two before it was good enough to be taken seriously by professionals.

There was no upside at all in being first with this particular invention. No lessons to learn, other than "Keep working on this and try to grab all the patents, even though they will expire before anyone cares."

[vkou]

> give the world the first digital camera... mismanagement on a gargantuan scale

Which why we're all flying on Wright airplanes, using Kenbak Personal Computers, and are all calling eachother with Bell telephones.

Being first to a market and not winning, or not even surviving isn't 'mismanagement on a gargantuan scale'. Especially when it comes to consumer devices, which have no moat or potential for monopoly consolidation.

-Sent from my BlackBerry(tm)

[seanhunter]

Obviously not, but Wright and Kenbak weren't dominant in their markets and Bell was broken up by the courts, so those are pretty poor examples you've chosen there.

[vkou]

They were the first to market, though. That's my point. Being the first is a small advantage that can be lost for a ton of reasons, most of which don't require gross mismanagement.

And Bell's telephony network (which unlike consumer devices has a moat) was split up by the courts. I'm talking about telephones. Those devices with a base station, a handle, and a dial pad or a rotor (or sans all that, a switching board lady who will connect you to whomever you need to talk to).

Bell was the first to market with the personal telephone, but for some reason, didn't corner the market for consumer devices.

[intrasight]

Kodak could rightfully lay claim to having been the first tech platform company. With the Brownie camera - released in 1900.

My father worked there for 33 years. I did an internship in 1984. My boss took me on a tour of one of the buildings at our site - where all disc cameras were manufactured. When I did my internship, the single site where I worked employed 14,000 people. Our start and end times were staggered in five minute increments to manage traffic.

[dtagames]

Kodak itself was the first to demonstrate a digital camera in 1975.[0] There is no one else to blame for any decisions.

[0] https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/kodak-engineer-ha...

[jljljl]

From the article it sounds like they had strong market share in Digital Cameras in the early 2000’s. What really killed then was phones becoming the dominant form factor

[xhkkffbf]

It's true. I chose Kodak digital cameras and was happy with them. They were simple, well-priced and pretty nice all around.

It's just that the cell phones took over that job. (And a dozen other ones too.)

[Melatonic]

They should have become a digital sensor supplier like Sony - could have been big if they did it early enough

[hopelite]

You imply a major if not the only real factor in all of this, the self-destruction America engaged in to “fight communism” by advantaging others at its own detriment. The simple version of this matter is that in the 70-90s it was Japan, from the 80s Mexico/Latin America, from the 90s on it was China, from the 00s India, etc.

In essence, America was ruined by a kind of fast talking con artistry by people with selfish interests. America has fallen to con artists … “listen here. What you really need to do is help others in my interest, and not help your own in your own interests. That’s the smart thing to do. You see?“

[DerekL]

But switching to making digital cameras wouldn’t have helped much, because selling cameras was never really their business. Their main business was selling film, photo paper, developer, etc.

[steveBK123]

And the mass market consumer digital camera market didn't last terribly long either and is effectively dead. It is now a high end hobby with low volume high margin production.

Smartphone cameras and digital distribution of images would have killed them 10-20 years later anyway.

[fragmede]

Given that Sony and Samsung make, basically, every smartphone cellphone camera sensor, it doesn't seem inconceivable that a more agile Kodak could have fully pivoted to producing cellphone camera sensors, and fully owned that segment, as well as adding value add services that took advantage of their printing expertise. Sending digital photos to Kodak for them to print and mail them back to you wouldn't have saved all of the company, but if we handwave that it were successful at that, the brand could have kept going for a lot longer. Following that, a prescient, adaptible Kodak could also have created a photo sharing service, like Flickr or Instagram.

The question of why is CEO and executive pay so high always comes up, and between Kodak and RIM/Blackberry, it's easy to argue the good ones are worth what they're paid, as the ones who tank the company clearly are not.

[mitthrowaway2]

Yes, I think if a television and casette-player company like Sony could succeed at pivoting into making CMOS imaging sensors, Kodak could certainly have done the same and beaten them to the punch.

As for executive pay, I think the biggest problem is that it often seems like the executive class gets richly rewarded whether they succeed or fail. Boeing's former CEO was rewarded more for his failures than most people earn for a lifetime of good performance.

[hopelite]

Not if they had specialized in researching camera sensors. But that is also one of the most challenging types of pivots to sell to a board, “you know what we should do, specialize in developing the technology that will make our core business obsolete” is a really hard sell.

It seems to be the very same challenge that Google is now dealing with and suffering from. My understanding is that they could have beat OpenAI to market, but they also realized it would savage their core cash cow the search-ad ecosystem they’ve built over decades now; so they put on the brakes and effectively gave way to the competition being able to overtake them. They choked under pressure. Frankly, just for that reason Nadal should have already been removed by now, almost 3 years after the release of ChatGPT. But it’s also a sign of an incompetent and out of touch board that he has not been removed.

It’s immensely challenging to make such a leap. It’s akin to an addiction, how do you convince a Google to give up its search-ad meth? It is nearly impossible short of drastic events. You have to have a clear vision.

Ironically, it seems Microsoft has been making these types of hard decisions, but that also probably is because they’ve been under some intense pressure in various businesses for a while now, i.e., they have not really been king of the hill in anything that they are not de facto monopolists, e.g., PC OS. It is easier to pivot strategies when you’re not vested in maintaining something and their dominance over the whole government-corporate PC network allows them room to operate for am the time being. But there is also a reason why AI has been called an operating system. In the AI-scale medium term, Windows and its involvement in a user facing computer network is also doomed.

[regnull]

I always thought that this story is probably more nuanced, and indeed it is:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kodak-digital-camera-inven...

In particular:

"While this may have been a motivating factor to some at Kodak, such concerns did not stop Kodak — or even Sasson — from further developing digital cameras and making several technical developments that led to Kodak's first publicly available digital camera in 1991, the Digital Camera System."

[mytailorisrich]

Yes, this is a classic case of "innovator's dilemma". [1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

[2] https://innovationmanagement.se/2017/05/24/the-innovators-di...

[NuclearPM]

With