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Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

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Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#221

Post by alephnerd »

smcin wrote: post #125
alephnerd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever been to Folsom, Chandler, Olathe, Huntsville, Quad Cities, Peoria, Irvine, San Diego, North Chicago, East Liberty, Taylor, etc? We have seen a decrease in companies that work on physical engineering goods, but plenty still remain. The difference is, engineering physical goods has been increasingly automated and skilled for decades now (robotic manufacturing, additive manufacturing, CAD tooling, etc has been a th…

I still don't understand why San Diego-Tijuana isn't in principle as strong in design+manufacturing as the Hong Kong-Shenzhen axis. (What needs to happen in order to make that so?) > Even the "MBAs" they hire in LDPs are required to have technical undergrad degrees before joining an MBA. It frightens me the quotes you put around "MBAs" like that, those are the best type of MBAs. In general the cadre of people who go…

> I still don't understand why San Diego-Tijuana isn't in principle as strong in design+manufacturing as the Hong Kong-Shenzhen axis

It is in Medical Devices and Defense Tech.

The San Diego and Tijuana EDCs are closely integrated and use a single-window system so that you as a company doing R&D in SD and prototyping and manufacturing in Tijuana are dealing with a single entity.

> It frightens me the quotes you put around "MBAs" like that

Because on HN, people use "MBA" to designate CorpDev, FP&A, CorpStrat, GM, and other management and revenue ownership roles.

> those are the best type of MBAs

I agree, and employers agree as well.

There's a reason alumni from Wharton SF, Haas PTMBA, Stanford HCP MS&E, MIT's Sloan+LGO Fellowship, CMU Tepper's PTMBA, UW Foster's EMBA, UT McCombs' Hildebrand MBA, and UCLA Anderson's FlexMBA are overrepresented in engineering industries.

Employers tend to sponsor high leadership potential employees to attend these programs in return for them climbing the ladder internally.

An entire generation of Cybersecurity and Enterprise SaaS CPOs and CEOs are products of this initiative at Cisco and PANW back in the 2000s

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#222

Post by alephnerd »

glimshe wrote: post #140
alephnerd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Other parts of the world still have factory cities I mean, factory cities in other countries are also increasingly being automated as well. Look at what happened to Wolfsburg in Germany as well as the investments in robotic and additive manufacturing in China leading to around 20 million factory jobs being shed from 2013 to 2023 [0]. If an Indian auto manufacturers like Maruti Suzuki themselves had a 1 robot for 4…

I'm fine with all of this. Factory hubs are the new factory cities. You still get to employ thousands who don't necessarily have a PhD in computer science.

Ah ok! I thought you were pining for the days of a town with only a single employer dominating hiring.

That is an unsustainable model.

> You still get to employ thousands who don't necessarily have a PhD in computer science

You're a magnitude off. It's more like hundreds, and you will tend to hire people with a BS in an Engineering discipline.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#223

Post by mark-r »

woofcat wrote: post #190
dougdonohoe wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Doomed from the start" for a 133 year old company seems a bit hyperbolic. They have lasted 13 decades and counting. How many other company started in the 1890s are still around today?

I'm presuming they were trying to say "Doomed from the start of the digital revolution"

Yes, that's exactly what I meant. Thanks for clarifying, and sorry for being unclear at the start.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#224

Post by guerrilla »

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #220
kkaske wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like journalism used to be considered a higher calling. Getting things right was very important. Maybe I’m misremembering, or maybe the internet has just drowned real journalism in a sea of clickbait headlines.

It certainly feels like there is no journalism in our zeitgeist. It’s been replaced by propaganda, and sensationalism.

I think it was always like that but there were people in journalism fighting hard against it. They lost, apparently somewhat permanently it seems.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#225

Post by libraryatnight »

kkaske wrote: post #216
guerrilla wrote: post #205

Hey uhh have you guys seen this? "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.ko…

I feel like journalism used to be considered a higher calling. Getting things right was very important. Maybe I’m misremembering, or maybe the internet has just drowned real journalism in a sea of clickbait headlines.

I think about this a lot, because I feel it too. Some of it seems to be a result of these "higher callings" becoming just jobs. The closest example is how I'm often perplexed that so many people with "computer science" and specializations in software "engineering" seem so... clueless. Not all, but a lot. At a certain point I met a few people who were old electrical engineers that worked in computers. They knew more about software and seemed more like "engineers" and it was because there was no "computer science" when they came up. They were electrical engineers that ended up in computers because it was interesting to them. To them it was a higher calling. To the new school, it is a job. There's still genuinely curious people and those that have the "call" but they're mixed in with people who just heard this shit pays well. And since these things are now integrated into society, the pool is extra diluted.

And that doesn't even start in on the parts perverted by our present stage of capitalism and the monsters at the top of it. So uh, it's nuanced, but yeah it feels like it sucks - there are people trying though.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#226

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

smm11 wrote: post #210

We need an American Samsung-like company. Kodak could have been it. Then again, Sears could have made Amazon a pets-dot-com flash in the pan.

I will never understand it. The Sears catalog was an American staple for years. If they had gone online, they could have been what Amazon is today 20 years ago, and Amazon would have just been an online bookstore.

It was such an obvious thing to do and they didn't do it.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#227

Post by alephnerd »

libraryatnight wrote: post #225
kkaske wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like journalism used to be considered a higher calling. Getting things right was very important. Maybe I’m misremembering, or maybe the internet has just drowned real journalism in a sea of clickbait headlines.

I think about this a lot, because I feel it too. Some of it seems to be a result of these "higher callings" becoming just jobs. The closest example is how I'm often perplexed that so many people with "computer science" and specializations in software "engineering" seem so... clueless. Not all, but a lot. At a certain point I met a few people who were old electrical engineers that worked in computers. They knew more a…

I mean, true independent journalism started off as a blue collar job.

The journalists who drove the Muckraker movement [0] were a mix of self taught and state school grads who worked for newspapers like McClure and the World which were founded by hardscrabble immigrants [1][2] who were educated in a nontraditional background.

Fundamentally, journalism back in the day was a calling that could only be learned by doing, and the modern "BA-to-MA-to-Local-to-National" pipeline is an aberration.

Ironically, the more charged, polarized, and independent news blogs are closer to "original" Muckraker journalism than centralized institutions like a NYT or a CNN.

Imo, an apprentice driven model coupled with part-time college would probably help solve the journalism pipeline issue.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._S._McClure

[2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#228

Post by jachriga »

guerrilla wrote: post #224
pyinstallwoes wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly feels like there is no journalism in our zeitgeist. It’s been replaced by propaganda, and sensationalism.

I think it was always like that but there were people in journalism fighting hard against it. They lost, apparently somewhat permanently it seems.

"Journalism" has to compete with the likes of TikTok these days in terms of information availability, and TikTok (and it's infinite scrolling ilk) are not subject to the same principles that traditional journalism has been.

It makes perfect sense that the modern press has devolved to a 24-hour rumor mill; if they hadn't, they'd be even more irrelevant.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#229

Post by vkou »

seanhunter wrote: post #218
vkou wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> give the world the first digital camera... mismanagement on a gargantuan scale Which why we're all flying on Wright airplanes, using Kenbak Personal Computers, and are all calling eachother with Bell telephones. Being first to a market and not winning, or not even surviving isn't 'mismanagement on a gargantuan scale'. Especially when it comes to consumer devices , which have no moat or potential for monopoly consol…

Obviously not, but Wright and Kenbak weren't dominant in their markets and Bell was broken up by the courts, so those are pretty poor examples you've chosen there.

They were the first to market, though. That's my point. Being the first is a small advantage that can be lost for a ton of reasons, most of which don't require gross mismanagement.

And Bell's telephony network (which unlike consumer devices has a moat) was split up by the courts. I'm talking about telephones. Those devices with a base station, a handle, and a dial pad or a rotor (or sans all that, a switching board lady who will connect you to whomever you need to talk to).

Bell was the first to market with the personal telephone, but for some reason, didn't corner the market for consumer devices.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#230

Post by bawolff »

close04 wrote: post #170
bawolff wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 2010s: Kodak tried to become a Blockchain company, issuing KodakCoin. It was a flop. Its hard not to laugh at that. At least the pivots before that point kind of made sense. I guess 2010 came along and the executives just decided to yolo.

> At least the pivots before that point kind of made sense. But was this even a real pivot? They "rented" out their name to a company with an already failed crypto coin project, who thought they'll make it if they use a bigger brand. A pivot implies some effort to change the business model, not just literally throwing your name out there and hoping money follows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin seems to say it was very photography themed and planned to integrate with their stock photo offering. Seems like it was at least integrated with their brand, so it wasnt just a totally random project
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