Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

Companies like RIM and Nokia had smartphones. The people running them were smart. Their engineering was good. It had to be because wireless access to the internet wasn't ubiquitous. Suddenly the companies faced the first mover disadvantage.

It's difficult to imagine how revolutionary the technology of Kodachrome was. It utterly disrupted consumer photography and photojournalism and professional photography. The fact that Kodak was experimenting with digital photography in the 1970's shows how out front they were and they were right to treat it as a technology that wouldn't be viable for more than two decades...and one that nobody has figured out how to monitize except via the sale of hardware.

There's probably no plausible alternate universe where Kodak managed to produce sustainable profit from processing and storing digital images or selling media or anything related to their core business. Digital photography moved image production out of retail channels. I could text an image to ten of my relatives without a trip to Walgreens for one hour processing, and $0.08 3x5 prints in an hour available in the mid 1990's was a pretty amazing innovation versus the four or five days and significantly higher prices that were typical in the 70's and 80's.

Kodak wasn't a company standing still. It just didn't have a good way to make money from digital imagery: HP had them beat in the printer ink as liquid gold market and the camera manufacturers weren't going anywhere: optics are still bounded by the physics of optics.

Circling back, I think it wasn't so much people sitting around and thinking "we're Kodak" as it was the fact that Kodak wasn't Nokia and hence didn't have a history of selling off it's mainline business and moving into a new industry. Not that as a publicly traded company in the US that would have ever really been a viable option. Quarter by quarter, Kodak was obligated to maximize stockholder value for the short rather than long term.

Companies become obsolescent. Consider Sun.

“They were convinced that no one would ever want to look at their pictures on a television set,” he said. “Print had been with us for over 100 years, no one was complaining about prints, they were very inexpensive, and so why would anyone want to look at their picture on a television set?”

You are a hugely successful business, and all of your numbers are great, so this indication that some time "far off" into the future you will have an issue? Well you can worry about that when you get there. And senior management will continue to manage "to the numbers." That means sales guys are making their quota, margins are hitting their targets, Etc. And in Kodak's case, when they lost a customer they had no visibility into it, that customer simply stopped buying film and prints. They didn't buy them more cheaply from some competitor (that would have shown up in their market surveys) instead they just vanished.

What was more, their competitors were living off the amateur market. The amateurs who wouldn't buy the professional grade film, and so their competitors died or quietly exited the business while Kodak's core business remained "strong". There was no price pressure on film or processing.

As a result it was easy not to see the fundamental cancer growing in the middle of the film business, and when demand for film started falling off a cliff the company was already half dead. The "fix" would have been to reduce the company size to a point where it didn't have the capacity to meet all of the current film demand, because by the time the company had shrunk that far demand would have shrunk to meet it.

This is all obvious looking backwards, and to some other peoples points the executives all retired and got pensions and payouts. As an institution, the company failed. There was no process for re-creating the company from the ashes of the dying product line.

What? That's amazing! I work in high-speed videography and your father's filter is a part of my daily live. Awesome!

https://momentlens.co/shop/#lenses

The miniature bayonet mount is really nicely done.

How can you transition from the highest margin CPG product of all time to a new regime where there are almost no marginal costs per use? Kodak had well over 100k employees at its peak and was a global brand just like coke. They even saw their demise decades before it occurred.

But what is management supposed to do in a quarterly environment where CEOs are getting ousted other than double down on their success and cut costs? There was never any real money to be made in digital photography and if anyone was going to figure it out, they certainly weren't living in Rochester.