[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.