Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?

[Can any public company plan on a multi-decade time scale? This is an anthropological, sociological, cultural and business question of interest in the academic literature.]

Others, along with Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen, have written extensively on the general cultural difficulty of spending money now for an uncertain future while making money presently on a multi-decade investment.

Xerox was originally under the thumb of Kodak, in Rochester, New York, as the maker of photographic paper, chemicals and related equipment, known as the "The Haloid Photographic Company" (halides -- bromine and related chemical elements, along with silver, being the key photographic chemicals of photography) and founded in 1906.

The owner-leadership of the Haloid company in the 1930s and 1940s knew the company was doomed in the long-run with their then-present capability. Later on, it turns out that neither the Xerox of 1995, nor the Kodak of 1995 understood the necessity of having a keen paranoia of their technology's changing future and future unreliable income.

Xerox's, Kodak's, and other corporate stories are both studied in graduate-level business and engineering programs looking at the risks of failing to plan for change, the end of patent monopoly and market domination, and the cultural and financial necessity for understanding, committing to, and planning on the demise of the present technology currently sustaining an organization.

The Haloid company was not crushed by Kodak, in part, because of antitrust laws, but it was always in danger of failing in a competitive market dominated by Kodak, and from the 1930s onward had committed money to find and own a technology that was sustainable and patentable to survive: the Haloid company invented the term "xerography" (dry image transfer).

After the growing success of xerography in the late 1950s, and 1960s, after near-death experiences bringing the technology to market, the culture of developing and ultimately surviving on the new market of new-but different technology was lost in the profits of xerography in the minds of the then-present executive leadership, addicted to the amazing profits of xerographic patents: thus the results of new research and technology failed to be supported to make it to market.

Yet the Xerox company's creations, developments and discoveries are the present backbone of the present era of computing: ethernet, laser printers, personal computers, graphical user interfaces, Smalltalk (see also Object Oriented Programming and Virtual Machines, and the like). Look up the history of Xerox's "Palo Also Research Center (PARC). The Smallalk VM was the foundation of Self, and the later Java VM, with the addition of a couple decades of further work.

See "Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer" by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander for that story, published in 1988, nearly three decades ago. The cultural failures and non-response parallels are remarkable.

Doubtless there are dozens of similar reports on the Kodak cultural inertia and failure to understand change, in academic articles, and books. Google is your friend.

Kodak leadership thought that they could not profit from digital cameras, and early and expensive technology could only be used by large institutions (NASA). As costs dropped, Kodak thought that their market was commodity consumables, so they licensed the technology they created. The consumables chemistry and photographic films and papers market ended with with the rise of digital photography (no negatives), and digital, color ink-jet and xerographic reproduction of images.

EDIT: halide elemental chemical family

    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 the thousands
    of chemicals its researchers had created for use in film
    might instead be turned into drugs. But its pharmaceutical
    operations fizzled, and were sold in the 1990s.

Kodak did follow up with digital though. They had a digital SLR by 1994 (before Canon or Nikon) and digital cameras for $299 by 1996.

The advantage that companies like Nikon and Canon had are their lenses, and the huge investments photographers made in their lenses is what locked them in to a particular brand.

This is why a lot of traditional camera companies (Konica, Minolta, Fuji, Polaroid) were unable to keep up.