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Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

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Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

#51

Post by thisjustinm »

I worked for Kodak from 2002-2009 in their Windsor, CO plant, in the Thermal Media Manufacturing division and also wrote the occasional post for the corporate blog (thermal media == Dye sublimation printer media used in Kodak Picture Kiosks mainly). AMA.

It was the same thing every year - digital is cannibalizing film faster than we thought, we need to close down X or lay off N people. A year or two of that sure but over and over again and it became clear the executives were just not getting it. Looking back I wonder if they just decided to slowly ride the ship down, extracting nice salaries along the way. I still can't understand how someone - activist shareholders, a board member with half a brain, an executive willing to speak out - didn't make a bigger stink and try to get fresh leadership.

I remember one year at an all division meeting they showed the latest corporate "motivational" video - "Winds of Change" (http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JYW49bsiP4k). We thought finally, they get it and are admitting we've been stagnating and now we're gonna turn it all around. Everyone was super pumped up for weeks.

Then we realized the only thing that had changed was our ad agency who had produced the video.

Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

#52

Post by WalterBright »

ekianjo wrote: post #44
WalterBright wrote: post #22

I (and I've noticed this in others my age) still have a lingering thought that photography is expensive, and to conserve 'film'. Back in the day, even with slides, the finished cost per slide was about a buck each. It's just hard to dispel the habitual thought "is this shot worth taking?" I'm still getting used to the ability to snap a pic and casually text it to a friend instead of trying to describe it. I just down…

Film is expensive but its still unbeatable in terms of dynamic range and details, especially if you go to larger formats than 35 mm.

I know. But I never was a good photographer, and digital photography has improved to the point where it's more than good enough for me.

My dad had a rangefinder Leica, and he swore by it. But I look at the pictures he took, and they're often slightly out of focus, grainy, under/over exposed, etc. I'm sure great photographs can be taken with a Leica, but you've got to be a great photographer to get them. But for sure they were better than the brownie he had before :-)

Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

#53

Post by DanBC »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #28
pavlov wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kodak? Around 2005 when the iPhone hardware spec was being designed? They had completely lost the digital camera game by then.

I had a Kodak digital camera in 2003. It was no better or worse than competing consumer digital cameras - i.e. it was a usable but mediocre affordable snap cam. I think where Kodak lost it was failing to bring high end technology into compacts. Kodak had a big stake in professional digital cameras before 2000. It's completely wrong to say they weren't in the market. In fact they almost owned it. The first professiona…

> Now I have an iPhone with a camera which can give an old SLR a run for its money

Modern smart phone cameras are very very good.

But you can change the lens on SLRs, and that's something you can't do on iPhone.

And you can change the aperture and shutter speed on an SLR, which gives you a lot of control over the image.

Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

#54

Post by rgovind »

vibrolax wrote: post #42

Rochester NY resident since 1982, Kodak's peak employment year. Wrote embedded software for Xerox for a couple years around 2000. My belief is that companies like Kodak, Xerox, HP, IBM, etc. have business structures that cannot survive in a low margin business. These companies drove and thrived with technological change for decades. The leadership could not accept the change of their key lines of business into low ma…

If that is true, I believe Google, MS wold have a similar problem but Amazon won''t

Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

#55

Post by gkya »

WalterBright wrote: post #22

I (and I've noticed this in others my age) still have a lingering thought that photography is expensive, and to conserve 'film'. Back in the day, even with slides, the finished cost per slide was about a buck each. It's just hard to dispel the habitual thought "is this shot worth taking?" I'm still getting used to the ability to snap a pic and casually text it to a friend instead of trying to describe it. I just down…

Off topic, but would you mind naming the scanner app?

Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

#56

Post by eulevik »

mschuster91 wrote: post #47
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a Kodak digital camera in 2003. It was no better or worse than competing consumer digital cameras - i.e. it was a usable but mediocre affordable snap cam. I think where Kodak lost it was failing to bring high end technology into compacts. Kodak had a big stake in professional digital cameras before 2000. It's completely wrong to say they weren't in the market. In fact they almost owned it. The first professiona…

> Now I have an iPhone with a camera which can give an old SLR a run for its money, and photo sharing is no problem. Well, the iPhone may be nice if you're near the object you want to photograph and it's a bright sunny day, but: - it horribly sucks at low-light photography, you can't just screw an iPhone to a camera tripod to get a beautiful shot of the night sky - there are CF and SD cards with WiFi support, which c…

http://tiffen.com/steadicamsmoothee/

Steadicam for iPhone

Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

#57

Post by afian »

From the warren buffet autobiography ...

“What about Kodak? asked Bill Ruane. He looked back at Gates to see what he would say. “Kodak is toast,” said Gates.8 Nobody else in the Buffett Group knew that digital technology would make film cameras toast. In 1991, even Kodak didn’t know that it was toast.9 “Bill probably thinks all the television networks are going to get killed,” said Larry Tisch, whose company, Loews Corp., owned a stake in the CBS network. “No, it’s not that simple,” said Gates. “The way networks create and expose shows is different than camera film, and nothing is going to come in and fundamentally change that.”

“You’ll see some falloff as people move toward variety, but the networks own the content and they “can repurpose it. The networks face an interesting challenge as we move the transport of TV onto the Internet. But it’s not like photography, where you get rid of film so knowing how to make film becomes absolutely irrelevant."

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/us/hj_bz.l

Excerpt From: Schroeder, Alice. “The Snowball.” Bantam Books, 2009. iBooks.

Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

#58

Post by ohazi »

ekianjo wrote: post #44
WalterBright wrote: post #22

I (and I've noticed this in others my age) still have a lingering thought that photography is expensive, and to conserve 'film'. Back in the day, even with slides, the finished cost per slide was about a buck each. It's just hard to dispel the habitual thought "is this shot worth taking?" I'm still getting used to the ability to snap a pic and casually text it to a friend instead of trying to describe it. I just down…

Film is expensive but its still unbeatable in terms of dynamic range and details, especially if you go to larger formats than 35 mm.

That's not really true anymore. While large format film may still have a slight resolution advantage IF you have high resolution lenses to match, most high-end sensors have better dynamic range than film (~14-15 stops vs ~13 stops).

Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

#59

Post by Broken_Hippo »

This isn't exactly insider, but offhand experience. I worked at a pharmacy from 2005-2013 that had Kodak film processing and digital printing machines. Early on, there was a still a great deal of actual film. Digital cameras still were expensive or not rivaling the quality of film. Many machines didn't offer negative-to-cd, but offered a floppy disk. This slow updating of their equipment was a theme in the company. As film sales slowed, Kodak grew worse. Outsourced tech support for the machines, who were graded on whether or not they had to send a technician out to the store. That was switched to another system, where a tech called back. Most times this was recorded as done, but wasn't. This sort of thing was very common, and didn't improve as they sold off and outsourced bits of the company. They did finally start updating machines, and having fewer locations that processed film quickly and phased out send-away processing - truly focusing on digital products. By then, their advantage had slipped. While they relied on quality film before, their prints seemed no better quality than competitors.

Part of the problem was obviously that they didn't take digital seriously soon enough. This in combination with what seemed like a poorly run company meant software always lagged behind sometimes by years. For example, it took some time before folks could put video from their camera onto a dvd, and the cd's themselves could only hold 120 pictures while SD cards were keeping thousands. It was a software issue. In addition, some of the retail outfits they contracted through seemed overpriced.

I think the official story was filled with lament over not taking digital technology seriously early on. While I read some stuff about them, it has been some years and I don't know how much was reserved for the workplace environment.

Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

#60

Post by musesum »

thisjustinm wrote: post #51

I worked for Kodak from 2002-2009 in their Windsor, CO plant, in the Thermal Media Manufacturing division and also wrote the occasional post for the corporate blog (thermal media == Dye sublimation printer media used in Kodak Picture Kiosks mainly). AMA. It was the same thing every year - digital is cannibalizing film faster than we thought, we need to close down X or lay off N people. A year or two of that sure but…

Wow, that is an amazing video! 2006. Facial recognition. Sharing to your PDA ... oops! Then, a few months later, the iPhone happened.
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