Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

Thought experiment..even if you could time travel, how would you have saved Kodak?

Fuji made some excellent early digital cameras. So well built and using very little power. I took one into my workshop and it even survived there during several projects (and that's a pretty bad environment for a camera).

I'm not surprised they survived, they caught on early and made good gear.

As opposed to Canon cameras that give cryptic errors about lenses 3 days after the warranty expires, HP cameras that used a set of batteries every 60 shots or so and so on.

It's a pity that Asahi/Pentax didn't survive as an independent.

I worked for Creo when it was acquired by Kodak in 2005 for $1B and then later for Kodak for quite a few years. At the time Kodak still had cash but film was obviously in decline. This acquisition was part of a $3B acquisition spree.

Kodak's mangement proceeded to run Creo into the ground through a series of layoffs, remote micromanagement, shuffling things around etc. At the time of the acquisition Creo was profitable (though definitely with some challenges) and had a few growth initiatives that looked promising (all cancelled). Very capable management, good people, and well run. There were a lot of opportunities to create some long term value in different areas but the only Kodak strategy was to keep cost cutting and milk all the businesses to their death.

What was amazing to me is that the CEO kept his job even after Kodak's market cap went below $1B. I forget what that market cap was at the time of the acquisition but probably in the $10-$20B range. Gotta be one of the top ten value destroying CEOs of all times.

For many many years it didn't matter what management did, film kept printing money for the company. Only when things changed you could tell that management was actually incompetent. Before that you didn't need to be competent to keep making money. Kind of like Warren Buffet says, only when the tide goes out you find who is swimming without their bathing suits...

I just saw something on Bloomberg the other day about Kodak finally getting some anti-counterfeiting technology that AFAIK is the same one developed in Creo over 10 years ago (Traceless) released.

EDIT: Another personal anecdote is that the first "real" digital camera I ever used, I'm guessing around 1996, was a Kodak. It was pretty decent. I think the price tag was quite high. At that point in time Kodak had a good reputation in digital cameras. The problem is digital cameras would never replace film as a business even if Kodak went 100% into digital. They needed to diversify.

My dad devised the "Bayer filter" used in digital cameras, in the 1970's in the Kodak Park Research Labs. It is hard to convey now exactly how remote and speculative the idea of a digital camera was then. The HP-35 calculator was the cutting edge, very expensive consumer electronics of the day; the idea of an iPhone was science fiction. Simply put, my dad was playing.

This was the decade that the Hunt brothers were cornering the silver market. Kodak's practical interest in digital methods was to use less silver while keeping customers happy. The idea was for Kodak to insert a digital step before printing enlargements, to reduce the inevitable grain that came with using less silver. Black and white digital prints were scattered about our home, often involving the challenging textural details of bathing beauties on rugs.

I have no inside information what so ever, but I am still today using a digital camera with a Kodak sensor almost daily (a M9). I am still baffled, how a company of this size and revenue can fall apart like this - probably only paralleled by the demise of Nokia. Till the early 2000s, Kodak was not only a leader in film but also in digital photography. Their CCD sensors are still made today, their sensor division now owned by OnSemi.

All the first Nikon and Canon DSLRs had Kodak technology in them. Not sure how things happened in detail, but eventually Nikon and Canon had their own digital technology, mostly based on CMOS sensors. Kodak had one more CMOS camera of their own - the 14n based on a Nikon body. But while being the highest resolution body at that time, it got mixed reviews. Still at that time Kodak probably would have had enough cash to buy Nikon.

Yet they withdrew from professional digital cameras, the last life sign was providing sensors for the Leica M9 and S. And with no other leg to stand on, the company mostly vanished with the collapse of the film market.

Ironically, the price you pay per roll of film is on an all-time high, so in theory, the business of making film should be more profitable than it was, but the scale just is not there any more.