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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?

#161

Post by dredmorbius »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #50
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…

The way I remember 1985 is that "made in China" wasn't a phrase but "made in Japan" absolutely was, see forex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_%28film%29 and reckon that that didn't get made in a vacuum.

This probably isn't the most valid use of Google's Ngram viewer, but it looks as if "Made in Japan" started taking off about 1980, "Made in Taiwan" slightly earlier, but on a lower trajectory, and "Made in China" really in 1993.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=made+in+China%...

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

#162

Post by dredmorbius »

smcl wrote: post #160
bostik wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was another one: "made in Hong Kong". I remember seeing that in various things, ever since my father pointed it out. It was common enough to exist in daily lingo. Most of the time it was a synonym for cheap knock-offs.

I also remember seeing "Made in Macau" on the bottom of little toy cars I played with when I was a kid, as well as other cheap toys and things. Bit of a contrast to today where Macau is the Vegas of the east

Macau didn't seem to be a big player relatively:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=made+in+China%...

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

#163

Post by dredmorbius »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #18
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #6

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…

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…

Robert Gordon mentions that in The Rise and Fall of American Growth.

Sears shut down its catalog division in 1992. Amazon launched in 1993.

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

#165

Post by cm2187 »

What I don't get is that my very first digital camera was a Kodak (must have been in 2000). It wasn't very good (but no camera were then) but it was one of the cheapest. So it's not like they were absent from the digital market. But still somehow they missed the boat.

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

#166

Post by PhantomGremlin »

miesman wrote: post #128

I worked for a subsidiary of Kodak around 91' and can offer a small view. My impression was that they were very aware of what was coming. They came out with the PhotoCD during this time. If you look at it was really a way to lock people into film for a longer time since you still needed to take your negatives in to be transferred. I also remember taking a photography class in 95 and having the teacher say right at th…

They came out with the PhotoCD during this time.

I used a follow-on product called Picture CD, which was an epic fail as far as I was concerned[1].

You paid an extra $7 IIRC when you had your film developed, and you got JPEGs on a CD. I gave them 35 mm print film and they gave me back 1024×1536 resolution JPEGs? That was literally worse resolution than the Canon S110 pocket camera I had then.

They got $7 out of me. Once.

The unwashed masses won't pay an extra $7 for a CD to go along with their prints, which probably cost about them about $7 for the roll (about $0.20 or $0.25 per print IIRC). They were being asked to pay double the total price.

More knowledgeable customers won't pay an extra $7 for such low resolution scans.

So who was this product for? I would have probably tried Photo CD but I think that was much more of a niche product and I didn't know about it. The mini-labs were only offering Picture CD. The services I used were usually 1 or 2 day (which meant actual processing was off-site), so they certainly could have been set up to do much higher quality scans than that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_CD

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

#167

Post by lmm »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #166
miesman wrote: post #128

I worked for a subsidiary of Kodak around 91' and can offer a small view. My impression was that they were very aware of what was coming. They came out with the PhotoCD during this time. If you look at it was really a way to lock people into film for a longer time since you still needed to take your negatives in to be transferred. I also remember taking a photography class in 95 and having the teacher say right at th…

They came out with the PhotoCD during this time. I used a follow-on product called Picture CD, which was an epic fail as far as I was concerned[1]. You paid an extra $7 IIRC when you had your film developed, and you got JPEGs on a CD. I gave them 35 mm print film and they gave me back 1024×1536 resolution JPEGs? That was literally worse resolution than the Canon S110 pocket camera I had then. They got $7 out of me. O…

I paid for it. The quality was pretty poor, but it beat scanning pictures myself (don't think I even owned a scanner at that time), and as a result I still have photos from 15-odd years ago that would almost certainly have been lost in my house moves since then otherwise.

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

#168

Post by T0T0R0 »

intrasight wrote: post #140
T0T0R0 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perce…

Regarding the current contrast between apparent states of Apple and Microsoft, I'd say Apple could be reduced to an identical state in a matter of six months by any other company coming out of the woodwork with some new, fully realized product the general public hasn't seen before. It's not innately reasonable to divine what such a product might be.

Meanwhile, consider that Microsoft was very strong in 2003, but through a few minor misteps, just missed the boat on a some key changes in technology. Then, when the things that killed their advantageous position finally made an appearance, they refused to give chase. Why they failed to jump on the new bandwagons, and how their own boat started taking on water, has a complex story of its own.

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

#169

Post by lordnacho »

I don't see it as so much of a failure of management.

To grab a large slice of some niche, you need to be invested in exploiting it. In Kodak's case, that meant having all these huge facilities for film technology. There's no other way to be a big player in this niche. The upside is nobody will ever avoid thinking of your brand when they are shopping for film.

The downside is you can't just change direction. If film becomes obsolete, the market in the replacement is not going to be big enough at the stage when you can see it. And its size is in itself what you will be using to judge whether it will happen, so it's quite hard to decide to dump all the old tech in favour of a tiny industry that might run into trouble. I'm sure there were many naysayers pointing out various flaws and potential roadblocks with digital.

If you do change direction, you inevitable step on the toes of someone else in the value chain. You make your own camera, you annoy the camera manufacturers. You want to be a chemicals business? It's full here, too. Remember you're a huge operation, and there's only so many things to do.

We should not mourn the death of large corporations though. Just like in nature, it frees up resources for new players doing new things.

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

#170

Post by gchpaco »

rplst8 wrote: post #110
ghaff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure if you've looked into Fuji's digital camera offerings as of late, but their doing much better there IMO than Canon/Nikon. Fuji has been innovating in sensor tech with their X-Trans sensor and their X series mirror-less cameras are very very well liked. Not only are the bodies innovative control-wise, they've hearkened back to older manual dial style cameras that are really simple to use, but the lenses a…

I love my X-Pro, and I loved Fuji film before it, but remember Fuji has never been under the anti-trust concerns Kodak has, and that forced them to divest the film processing and professional camera arms.
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