Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by thisjustinm » Mon, Jul 18, 2016, 3:48 AM UTC

bkjelden wrote: post #121

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…

Do you know what happened to the facilities? I'd imagine Kodak's 2nd largest manufacturing facility had quite a footprint.

About half was health related film (X-rays and such) and was sold off as another company who's name escapes me. I'd heard that one building was demolished but I believe most of it is still there

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

#132

Post by mark-r » Mon, Jul 18, 2016, 3:57 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #40

dewster wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I don't know if the story of the ceramics teacher is actually true, but it has the ring of truth and it applies to this example. Incremental improvement is a more sure path to success than striving for perfection out of the box.

http://kottke.org/09/02/art-and-fear

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

#133

Post by epc » Mon, Jul 18, 2016, 4:10 AM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #48

Turing_Machine wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma , is well worth reading. I don't think it's one of Christensen's examples (it's been a while since I read the book) but IMO the all-time greatest blunder of this type was Sears closing down their catalog operation the same year the first graphical web browser was introduced. The younger readers may not remember this, but there was a time when the Sears catalog sold everythi…

That one has always astonished me a lot more than Kodak, even as a foreigner. Why the hell would you close down a successful business operation, especially of that sort?

By the mid-1990s Sears was getting destroyed by Walmart, which was running circles around them with their logistics operation.

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

#134

Post by intrasight » Mon, Jul 18, 2016, 4:11 AM UTC

etangent wrote: post #130

intrasight wrote: post #43

This is something I'd posted previously on HN: I worked at Kodak as a summer intern in '85. Was the era of the disk camera. Was also my first programming job. Lotus 1-2-3. Most people today can't comprehend the scale of American manufacturing as it still was at that time. The Elmgrove plant where I worked (one of a dozen facilities in the Rochester area) has over 14 thousand employees. Our start and end times were st…

> What many at the time didn't yet recognize was that there was no business model in digital cameras that would employ 100 thousand engineers, managers, factory workers, technicians, and staff I believe you meant to say "that there was a business model".

No, I really meant "there was no business model". The film and film cameras supported many of those hundred thousand employees. Let's assume that 30K of them were in the film camera areas. Kodak, as a company that markets digital cameras built in China, would support perhaps 1000 employees in that endevour. A big drop. What Kodak ended up doing mostly was just license the brand name. Probably didn't even need 1000 employees for that.

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

#135

Post by intrasight » Mon, Jul 18, 2016, 4:19 AM UTC

sedachv wrote: post #111

tim333 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What could anyone do? One of the best discussions of this kind of issue I've read was Warren Buffet on the shutdown of Berkshire Hathaway's textile business. Berkshire was a textile business when he bought it which faced a decline similar to that of Kodak's film business. His answer, to reallocate capital to completely different businesses that were healthy. It was kind of what Fuji did when they switched from film…

That is my favorite piece of Buffet's writing, for a different reason: > Over the years, we had the option of making large capital expenditures in the textile operation that would have allowed us to somewhat reduce variable costs. Each proposal to do so looked like an immediate winner. > But the promised benefits from these textile investments were illusory. Many of our competitors, both domestic and foreign, were st…

In a sense they did - with Eastman Chemicals, which was also founded by George Eastman and which was spun off in 1994? It is a Fortune 500 company with around 20,000 employees.

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

#136

Post by jonahrd » Mon, Jul 18, 2016, 4:20 AM UTC

rplst8 wrote: post #109

Syzygies wrote: post #27

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 c…

Your dad is Bryce Bayer?

Sometimes things are made by teams of people

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

#137

Post by slang800 » Mon, Jul 18, 2016, 4:20 AM UTC

bkjelden wrote: post #121

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…

Do you know what happened to the facilities? I'd imagine Kodak's 2nd largest manufacturing facility had quite a footprint.

According to http://bizwest.com/deconstruction-on-kodak-campus/, demolition began on 2011-06-01, but that didn't get rid of the entire campus, since a few buildings were still being used. In 2012 Kodak sold 320 acres of it to become a part of the 1,800-acre Great Western Industrial Park [0][1]. In 2013 they sold of the last 200-person facility (which makes Kodak kiosk media) to the "U.K. Kodak Pension Plan", which has kept it running [2].

So there probably aren't any cool abandoned buildings there... The only one I've been able to find is [Kodak building nine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_building_nine) in Ontario.

[0]: http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/kodak-s-windsor-locatio...

[1]: http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2012/01/19/halliburto...

[2]: http://www.denverpost.com/2014/01/20/200-kodak-alaris-jobs-r...

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

#138

Post by slang800 » Mon, Jul 18, 2016, 4:21 AM UTC

thisjustinm wrote: post #131

bkjelden wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what happened to the facilities? I'd imagine Kodak's 2nd largest manufacturing facility had quite a footprint.

About half was health related film (X-rays and such) and was sold off as another company who's name escapes me. I'd heard that one building was demolished but I believe most of it is still there

Carestream Health Inc

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

#139

Post by Turing_Machine » Mon, Jul 18, 2016, 4:24 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #88

Animats wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That puzzled me, too. Sears was the first company to figure out large scale order fulfillment, around 1890. They had the back end operation figured out. They had merchandise for everything you really need in stock. All they needed was online ordering, which is the easy part. What's left of Sears is now owned by K-Mart. (K-Mart is descended from S.S. Kresge, which operated "dime stores". Dime stores were like dollar s…

Worse, they figured harder problems out -- they had solved the delivery problem in suburban and rural areas for large items. there was a Sears franchise network where you could pick up stuff delivered by an 18 wheeler or rail rather than wait for parcel post or ups.

Yep. Those were called "catalog stores", as I recall, and if you had your item sent to the catalog store shipping was free (or maybe reduced price -- it's been a long time, but there was definitely some kind of break on shipping costs).

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

#140

Post by intrasight » Mon, Jul 18, 2016, 4:33 AM UTC

T0T0R0 wrote: post #113

maxwell wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what could they do? Could they have bought NeXT in the mid '90s? Then maybe we'd all be walking around with a "smartcam" that also makes calls.

I mean, yeah, coulda, woulda, shoulda... but those sorts of alternate histories require some kind of A Priori knowledge that NeXT might become an incredible company, beyond that, augmenting the path of a company like NeXT will contaminate the timeline, provoking unpredictable ripple effects in the subsequent continuum. If Skynet kills John Connor, what will the machine world look like? What happens if Marty listens t…

Good point on the "timeline contamination". We like to say that "hindsight is 20/20" - which implies that if one could go back in time, one could take advantage of that future knowledge without changing that future outcome. I could say that if I went back in time to the early 90s and bought a bunch of Apple stock for like $5/share that I'd not change the future. But what if I got greedy and bought a significant percentage?

I do agree with your assessment of AAPL vs MSFT. Apple has ingrained itself into the fabric of our personal lives in a way that would be very hard to challenge. Microsoft never achieved that - because it was run by corporate sales folk.

Apple's undoing, if anything, will be from being to greedy.