201–210 of 240 posts
Interesting to compare the tech companies of last century with those of this era. Kodak employed a whole town, and many more people besides. We're now waiting on a one-person unicorn. The number of people benefiting from an enterprise has shrunk considerably, with the benefits accruing more tightly within an already wealthy class.
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And yet right now they’re back to chemical photography film being over 50% of their revenue due to the breakout success of the instax instant cameras. Being able to charge a dollar per photo remains an unbeatable business to be in.
I love instax… it’s seriously so good. The wide version especially. I’m addicted to shooting it.
I ended up with a Polaroid Go. It's relatively tiny. The output is nowhere near as good (arguably awful), but for my use, it's fine. I have 35mm film and mirrorless digital cameras when I want "good" photos.
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I would hardly describe a brand licensing agreement as a pivot of the company. A true pivot of Kodak was moving from just doing chemicals for film to doing chemicals for the pharmaceutical industry. That actually involved employees changing what they do, changing factory equipment, etc.
They did do more than just chemicals for film, but then decided to spin off the business so that they could focus on the film business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Chemical_Company One really must admire their determination to throw all of the life boats overboard to go down with the film ship. Every time they have a chance to save themselves if they move away from a single minded focus on film, they discar…
To be honest, I thought they were already completely gone. The article mentions them filing for bankruptcy in 2012. They were pretty much doomed from the start. They had built their business by taking a cut from every picture you took, from the rolls of film to the developing to the printing. There was absolutely nothing in the digital camera realm that could duplicate that; their revenue dropped like a rock. If they…
"Media reports that Kodak is ceasing operations, going out of business, or filing for bankruptcy are inaccurate and reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of a recent technical disclosure the Company made to the SEC in its recently filed second quarter earnings report. These articles are misleading and missing critical context, and we'd like to set the record straight."
https://www.kodak.com/en/company/blog-post/statement-regardi...
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I think where Kodak really missed in recent years is not jumping on the instant camera trend. Fujifilm has their Instax line and there's Polaroid with their "OG" cameras. It would have been easy for Kodak to become a leader in this space just with their brand cache.
I cannot imagine the "instant camera" market is too big. The cameras are expensive and the film is too, while the margins are likely terrible. If you want to make money in the US, stay away from making hardware and cling to making software.
More than 50% of it's imaging business in 2022
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People talk about physical goods and differences in scaling needs, one thing that bothers or excites me is noticing what the market tolerates. Many companies employed (and still employ) orders of magnitude more people than necessary just to be taken seriously. The executive team and board is stacked and diluting ownership just to get in rooms for more support and investors. This was arguably never necessary, and in m…
I’m having a lot of trouble parsing your post. You’re excited that billionaires will be able to swing around more billions than ever… to employ less people? What?
People that need income or capital to play this game at all will have to pursue another path of getting that, this post isn’t about their options and private sector employment by billionaires isn’t the only possibility
Maybe I'm reading the headlines wrong, but it doesn't seem like a lot of people read the actual press release and earnings report from the August 11th, 2025[1]: 1) The "Going Concern Assessment" that they put out was a regulatory requirement because they didn't have full control of the sale of parts of the pension. They say in the release that they're going to have the sale finalized on December 15th, with details on…
> I'd love to be corrected if I'm misreading this, but the reports of Kodak's death seem greatly exaggerated The basic background here is that Kodak has been pivotting at least for last 40 years. - 1980s: Kodak tried to become a Chemical magnate. This strategy was abandoned in 1990s. - 1990s: Kodak tried to become a Digital Imaging company. While it saw a brief success, Kodak lost the competition. - 2000s: Kodak trie…
The folks running Kodak kind of forgot that Kodak was really a chemicals company that supported photography, not a photography company. Hence why the pivot into that was ill-fated and doomed.
Then again, Sears could have made Amazon a pets-dot-com flash in the pan.