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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?

#141

Post by intrasight »

dredmorbius wrote: post #123
leoc wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: rich uncle Xerox did own PARC, and it didn't end up saving the company.

I was somewhat staggered in the late 1990s reading John Sealy Brown (former PARC director), in The Social Life of Information , which is otherwise and excellent book and one I'd still recommend, that the grand-daddy of technical reproduction businesses completely failed to mention its biggest competitor, the Apache Webserver, anywhere in the book (there was brief mention of the World Wide Web). I've worked with some…

Rent-seeking behaviour is not sustainable in a functioning capitalist society. But it can be very lucrative while it lasts, and it only has to last until you retire.

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

#142

Post by evan_ »

thisjustinm wrote: post #108
evan_ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, I worked for a photography studio during that time period and we used your printers. We had an 8660, which destroyed itself spectacularly and violently during an event, and an ML-500, which destroyed itself somewhat more slowly and had to have virtually every mechanical part replaced numerous times. When they worked they were great, but that never lasted very long. I spoke with Kodak support people quite a bit…

Oh man, you brought back some memories for me - I mainly referred to the printers by their internal codenames so thinking back through and connecting the model numbers to codenames really took me back. There was a few years there where demand really outstripped supply. We were the only place in the world that made the media for Kodak at the time and I'd say 2002-2006ish the kiosks were really doing well and we just c…

I'm sure traveling wasn't great for the health but we definitely had a lot of trouble with it, as did other studios we talked to. To Kodak's credit they were always really great about fixing them quickly.

Can't complain too much. We did a lot of school athletic tournaments and stuff like that, we could shoot a team and we'd have 8x10s ready to sell to parents before the kids got off the risers. Assuming everything was working smoothly it was a license to print money!

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

#143

Post by jwatte »

shalmanese wrote: post #105
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 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.

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

#144

Post by mathattack »

Here is the irony.... They were not too late, they were too early. [0] Their CEO pushed hard in digital from the early 90s, but they couldn't handle the losses. This is an example of a company's executives seeing the right thing, but not being able to survive the losses until the market caught up.

[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB869781042786228000

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

#145

Post by jwillis85 »

In some sort of alternate history. Setting Apple acquisition aside.. Kodak would have acquired Kinkos and branched out into online ondemand photo proofing for digital images. Then went totally Android and came out with something more like an iPad than a phone, perhaps leaning in the direction of GeoTagging and Environmental sensing. Phone tech might take a second seat to messaging and something more akin to video calls on demand.

Yeah Shoulda Coulda Woulda, it just seems there were less barriers to survivial and thriving than simply egos and business as usual attitudes.

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

#146

Post by ghaff »

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 have. I have an X-E1 in front of me as we speak and I use it more than my Canon full-frame system. It's just a lot more practical for most travel. And reminds me a lot of the rangefinders I used for years.

That said they're relatively niche.

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

#147

Post by ghaff »

SerLava wrote: post #103
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…

Maybe they should have obliterated their brand and gone into other chemical research and manufacturing.

Kodak actually sold off their chemical subsidiary way back when before they started declining. Using expertise in emulsions etc. is essentially what Fujifilm did but as I said elsewhere they still had hard times and I think we're quite a bit smaller.

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

#148

Post by djsumdog »

thisjustinm wrote: post #114
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…

> 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 economics has moved it overseas and the market is totally different.

It's still consumerism though, and a frightening scale. It's just abstracted away from most of the western world, so we don't see it.

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

#149

Post by bkyan »

I was a summer intern working in OLED research at Kodak in the early 90's. While not that many people associate Kodak with OLED, Kodak was considered one of the world leaders in OLED research at that time. There is a short paragraph about the folks I was working for, on the OLED page on Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED ). While Kodak was able to license the associated technology/patents, it didn't seem like they came out with any consumer OLED products of their own in the years that followed my short stay, there.

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

#150

Post by frankchn »

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.

I am not so sure, mainly because a lot of Intel's advantage comes from its process technology. The ARM instruction set might well take over, but you still need someone to make them.

Even at the current 14/16nm nodes, Intel's process is significantly smaller than TSMC or Samsung's [1]. I suspect we will see consolidation (a la GloFo/Samsung) and Intel branching out into being a foundry, but with building 10nm++ fabs running into the billions of dollars, I don't see Intel going anywhere any time soon.

[1]: http://newstechnow.com/plans-launch-14nm-finfet-technology-c...

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