Recent design grad from RIT. I learned from / worked with many former Kodak employees from the late 90's into early 00's. The majority of them worked on the consumer product side of the business.
It is my understanding that Kodak's efforts were too little too late. The organization was driven by the business people and was hemorrhaging money and only staying afloat through licensing and selling off their patent portfolio and the medical imaging devision. They watched their consumer product profits from film evaporate and failed to transition into the digital age.
These designers and engineers that I have learned from and worked with are certainly brilliant individuals. It seems that the organizational culture did not provide them with the creative freedom needed to envision and develop products competitive with those coming from smaller, nimbler companies.
I lived in Rochester, NY and got a 20 hr/week job interning at Kodak in the slide film research department during HS in 1999-2000. I remember on one occasion my boss, a mid-level executive (head of new slide film research? something like that) asked me what I thought about digital cameras, I think both because I was young and seen as "the computer guy". I didn't own one but I'd read about them a decent amount. I told…
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…
Pentax lives on today under Ricoh, and Ricoh is taking good care of it by making new camera bodies and lenses under the Pentax name.
Steven Sasson, the man who invented the camera gave a talk to my program (CE at Rochester Institute of Tech) about the process and downfall of his invention at Kodak. It all started as some backroom research project with no funding to see if they could do something with the new technology of CDC cells. The camera ended up at .01 Megapixels and stored on a tape (with about 20+ second write time). What most people did not realize is he also made a device for displaying the image onto a TV (what good is a digital image if there is no way to display it). IIRC the first "public" demo of this technology was during the Tiananmen Square Massacre to smuggle/transmit the video out of the county. If you watch one of the original broadcasts the only sign of it was a little Kodak logo at the bottom of the screen.
Now there is something you need to know about film.... it was probably one of the most profitable products ever. Also Kodak was not really a pure technology company, it was more of a consumer tech/chemical company. While they did have a lot of engineers (many of my professors all worked there), some were more focused on the manufacturing process rather than an end product. A lot of their internal structure was focused on making and processing chemical film.
When he showed this product to the upper level (however never the CEO) the demo went something like: walk into room with the camera, take picture of attendees, show picture on TV. While this was totally unheard of the time, mostly they all just laughed at the quality of the image and brushed it off. They also saw no appeal in viewing pictures on a TV screen vs an actual picture. A patent was filed and that was mostly the end of it.
A lot of people laugh at Kodak for that mistake, but it really it’s just another example of the inventors dilemma. At that time though it made perfect sense for Kodak to make that decision because they were just making so much money. One could say the technology was ahead of its time.
Well then digital really started to take rise. They ended up turning a lot of their focus into making personal photo printers. In 2004 Kodak then realized that almost every company that made a digital camera infringed on their patents and started to sue them all. They ended up winning a lot of money but they could never get their foot back into the market.
TLDR: Camera was ahead of its time and threatened to undo the whole company whose main focus was producing and processing chemical film.
Steven Sasson, the man who invented the camera gave a talk to my program (CE at Rochester Institute of Tech) about the process and downfall of his invention at Kodak. It all started as some backroom research project with no funding to see if they could do something with the new technology of CDC cells. The camera ended up at .01 Megapixels and stored on a tape (with about 20+ second write time). What most people did not realize is he also made a device for displaying the image onto a TV (what good is a digital image if there is no way to display it). IIRC the first "public" demo of this technology was during the Tiananmen Square Massacre to smuggle/transmit the video out of the county. If you watch one of the original broadcasts the only sign of it was a little Kodak logo at the bottom of the screen.
Now there is something you need to know about film.... it was probably one of the most profitable products ever. Also Kodak was not really a pure technology company, it was more of a consumer tech/chemical company. While they did have a lot of engineers (many of my professors all worked there), some were more focused on the manufacturing process rather than an end product. A lot of their internal structure was focused on making and processing chemical film.
When he showed this product to the upper level (however never the CEO) the demo went something like: walk into room with the camera, take picture of attendees, show picture on TV. While this was totally unheard of the time, mostly they all just laughed at the quality of the image and brushed it off. They also saw no appeal in viewing pictures on a TV screen vs an actual picture. A patent was filed and that was mostly the end of it.
A lot of people laugh at Kodak for that mistake, but it really it’s just another example of the inventors dilemma. At that time though it made perfect sense for Kodak to make that decision because they were just making so much money. One could say the technology was ahead of its time.
Well then digital really started to take rise. They ended up turning a lot of their focus into making personal photo printers. In 2004 Kodak then realized that almost every company that made a digital camera infringed on their patents and started to sue them all. They ended up winning a lot of money but they could never get their foot back into the market.
TLDR: Camera was ahead of its time and threatened to undo the whole company whose main focus was producing and processing chemical film.
My high school physics teacher worked at Kodak's research labs on CCDs, including some that were for use in "specialized applications," which I assume to mean spy satellites†. He said that he had quit when Kodak decided to stop shooting themselves in the foot and shot themselves in the head instead. That would have been the early 90s, I think. I don't have any specific mismanagement stories, but I'll send you his ema…
Kodak was always a big part of US IMINT capabilities. Before CCDs, they were making specialised films for the film-return spacecraft, and operating the facility where it was processed. There's some interesting stuff in the declassified NRO histories about upgrades to the film emulsions -- which I'm sure filtered through into Kodak's civilian products (e.g tabular grains).
While it seems likely that they remained involved in sensors and also optics, I wonder whether the loss of these secret film contracts may have left them weakened in the late 80s/early 90s (last film-return satellite should have flown in 1986, but was lost due to a launch failure), just when they needed to focus on some new product lines.
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…
OnSemi are retiring their CCD offering, IIRC they will stop producing CCD sensors by the end of this year.
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 profitab…
"The problem is digital cameras would never replace film as a business even if Kodak went 100% into digital. They needed to diversify."
In my short time in business, I have noticed how rare it is for a company to successfully get smaller and survive- even when the obvious business is going away.
There are quite a few articles online that go into some detail about it. Just search for "Kodak Clay Christensen", or something similar. Here's one: http://www.economist.com/node/21542796 Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its executives “suffered from a mentality of perfect products, rather than the high-tech mindset of make it, launch it, fix it...” Bad luck played a role, too. Kodak thought that…
Regarding your aside, if you develop black and white at home, there are kits to develop C-41 and E-6 at home as well. They're as easy as any standard black and white process.
I had never really put much thought into it, but you're totally right- the expectation was that a chemical company (essentially) would transform itself into a Hardware & software manufacturer. That's a might, mighty leap. That Fuji was actually able to do it is even more impressive. I worked for a company that did some work for Kodak - both directly and indirectly - around some of their software initiatives & partner…
Certainly Kodak did a lot of things wrong but there's a common meme straight out of Marketing Myopia [1] that, had they only thought of themselves as a photography company rather than a film company, all would have been well. This is basically nonsense. Even had Kodak been more aggressive about cannibalizing its film sales with digital, it's unclear how much of its expertise and competitive advantage would have carri…
There are quite a few articles online that go into some detail about it. Just search for "Kodak Clay Christensen", or something similar. Here's one: http://www.economist.com/node/21542796 Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its executives “suffered from a mentality of perfect products, rather than the high-tech mindset of make it, launch it, fix it...” Bad luck played a role, too. Kodak thought that…
>Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its executives “suffered from a mentality of perfect products, rather than the high-tech mindset of make it, launch it, fix it...” This is actually my preferred work environment. Fuck profits, I've got a rather short life to lead, and I'd like to get a little enjoyment and intellectual satisfaction for all my efforts. Has the development of anything really lasting…
On the other hand, Stradivarius made 1100+ instruments, which even over his long career - 77 years - comes to more than one per month, and probably more than that over his prime period. He certainly doesn't sound like someone agonizing over making the perfect instrument, instead improving them version by version.