What they actually fumbled was the transition to digital. Keeping analog film/camera assembly in the US would only have led to Kodak running out of money even sooner.
I don't know that they really fumbled anything. They had a pretty good set of digital cameras in the early 2000s. I owned one.
It's just the technology that was the underpinning of the entire company has outlived its usefulness. You don't see many companies making horseshoes today - but there were thousands 150 years ago. They didn't fumble anything - just no longer needed.
I agree with this, but as someone who occasionally shoots film I'm still very sad about it. There's still reasonable demand for film, I can walk into my local Target and pick up Fujifilm Fujicolor Superia 200 for $10 a roll. It's just really hard to scale down a business without imploding, but I firmly believe Kodak could have had a future as a boutique film supplier if they wanted to. It just wouldn't be super profitable.
Fuji has a pretty nice camera business today after not being a particularly notable player in film SLRs - or even digital SLRs before mirrorless ILCs (contrast with Olympus here, who whiffed starting with the transition to autofocus).
That'd still be a big change of course, but it's better than not being a player.
Or they could've been Sony, who's now both a major player in cameras and supplying sensors to tons of other cameras.
The inventors of capitalism are long dead. Lets not pretend its "mba's" or "corpos" that are the problem here. This is how capitalism works. If people dont like it then they should consider alternatives.