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

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

#221

Post by AceJohnny2 » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 2:21 AM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #67

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 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's an incredibly clearly written letter. It's amazing. If only more businesses communicated that way. But then of course most have reasons to obfuscate the situation...

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

#222

Post by starky » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 5:45 AM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #148

thisjustinm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people today can't comprehend the scale of American manufacturing as it still was at that time. This. During my seven years at the Windsor, CO Kodak plant (see my other comment below for more) it was crazy to hear of the heyday (I was there 2002-2009, not the heyday). It was the 2nd largest Kodak manufacturing center (bested only by Rochester) and built in the 60s. It was a sprawling campus of huge concrete bu…

There are still big plants in the US. The Volkswagen plant in South East Tennessee (thought nowhere near the scale of the plant you mentioned). But they do exist in China. Plants in some cities dump sludge into wastelands the size of lakes. Some factories are small towns unto themselves where people work, sleep and live on company property. We still need to the scale Kodak had for their market at the time, but econom…

It isn't that some factories have people work, sleep, and live there, that is the standard of how factories operate over there. Most workers are from outside of the area, so they provide all this for them in addition to pay that they send back to the family in other provinces. Even the engineers I've worked with at these companies often live in the dorms during the week, even though they may have apartments elsewhere.

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

#223

Post by starky » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 5:49 AM UTC

flyinghamster wrote: post #93

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My own memory of 1985 was that "Made in China" was just starting to get off the ground. Example: at the time, Black & Decker had bought out GE's small home appliance division. I had a Black & Decker-branded hair dryer (that had been a GE product beforehand) and was rather surprised to see "Made in China" on it. I felt it to be a bit ominous even at the time, never mind that products imported from Japan, Taiwan, etc.…

According to the data I've seen, the first huge growth in Shenzhen was centered on 1983, with the biggest peak coming around 1991.

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

#224

Post by fanf2 » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 11:45 AM UTC

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #207

porsupah wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even amongst more technically minded folk, there were some having difficulty accepting that the technical challenges facing digital photography would, in fact, be overcome. Here's quite an interesting thread from rec.photo, Dec 1990 onwards, discussing just that. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.photo/ZnqcQVzAln...

"Right now, 1 Megabyte of memory costs about $45 retail. This will not drop by an order of magnitude in the next decade without a breakthrough, or an economical Gallium-Arsenide process to replace Silicon." I love this line. Even in 1990 people didn't believe Moore's Law.

1990 was weird for memory prices because they were just recovering from memory shortages and price hikes. See this chart http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm and this newspaper article from the time http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/25/business/shortage-of-chips...

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

#225

Post by collinmanderson » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 1:19 PM UTC

jwatte wrote: post #143

shalmanese wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered, if you're an executive with perfect foresight and your analysis shows that you could either cling to your legacy technology and make a billion dollars for 10 years and then zero dollars after that as the inevitable disruption happened or go all in on self-disruption and make 100 million dollars until the end of time, which would really be the better choice? Given that disrupting yourself would have…

Intel is next. They're making billions on big, complex, expansive CPUs. Someone like ARM /will/ replace them, at a much smaller dollar volume.

The Windows world (and therefore most corporate offices) are very much dependent on the x86-64 architecture. The ecosystem will need to switch to web or (ARM) apps for Intel to die.

My eye doctor's office is switching to Android tablets, so maybe it's possible.

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

#226

Post by drited » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 2:11 PM UTC

They didn't entirely have their heads in the sand. --They invented the world's first digital camera Source: http://petapixel.com/2010/08/05/the-worlds-first-digital-cam...

-- They developed a massive patent portfolio including many digital photography patents that had an estimated value of $1.8 to $4.5 billion at the time of their Chapter 11 filing (read the article if you're interested for why it got sold for far less - it's fascinating) Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-lowballing-o...

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

#227

Post by phjesusthatguy3 » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 4:05 PM UTC

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…

To be fair, though, the first 15 (27?) years of the web were terrible. There was no way Sears was going to go whole-hog on 1990's web. Or 1993's web. Or 1999's web. It's barely usable now (he says, typing this into a web forum in 2016). A cow-orker of mine has a paper copy of the "1994 Internet yellow pages" and guess how many web sites are included? 0!

Yes, somebody should have come up with Amazon before Amazon did. But they didn't, and here we are now.

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

#228

Post by ecpottinger » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

mark-r wrote: post #129

phreanix wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I had saved the article but I remember reading somewhere (and just paraphrasing here) that the team that works on the iPhone make it good enough so you'll use your iPad (tablet) less, then the iPad team makes it so good you'll use your MacBook less, and so on. I think it's great forward thinking to be always trying to put one of your largest product lines out of business as a way to constantly innovate. In so…

Unlike Apple, Kodak was caught in a very hard place. With film they would collect revenue for every picture taken, through the film itself, developing, and printing. With digital you could make money on the cameras themselves, but your per-picture revenue opportunities were limited - this was the great attraction of digital. It's not the same as Apple replacing devices one-for-one.

Tell that to the people who make the inks for my Epson inkjet printer.

Inkjets can do great prints of photos, but only if you pay for the paper and ink.

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

#229

Post by summarite » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 8:47 PM UTC

T0T0R0 wrote: post #168

intrasight wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thro…

I'm not sure why you all think Microsoft has big problems. They still have the corporate and public sector, largely even the education market cornered. They are hugely profitable and right now taking crazy-looking but probably not exactly stupid steps towards changing their consumer business model.

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

#230

Post by combatentropy » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 10:39 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #120

combatentropy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most high-end sensors have better dynamic range than film (~14-15 stops vs ~13 stops) Film is the one with 14-15 stops. Plus its automatic S-shaped gamma curve, with gentle roll-off of the highlights, makes it easier to produce pleasing images. Movies, TV shows, and commercials that were shot on 35mm film in the 80s and 90s usually look better than the digitally shot ones today.

> look better than the digitally shot ones today Probably because modern directors cannot resist mucking about with the palette so it is all blue and orange. If it's a period peace, they make it all sepia brown. They've reverted to the two-strip technicolor from the 1920's. Arggh.

Oh yeah, the infamous teal-and-orange palette, haha