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Betting on things that never change (2017)

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Re: Betting on things that never change (2017)

#31

Post by danielmarkbruce »

groby_b wrote: post #29
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they would have invested a lot in digital cameras, executed well(?) and gone bankrupt. Mobile phones ended up eating cameras for all but very niche uses.

You do realize that the long-term success of a company requires more than one decision, right? SD cards are currently a $8bn market. Phone image sensors are a $15bn market. Digital camera market is $8bn (and growing, fwiw) There's also the fact that memories need displaying. I hear OLEDs are popular these days. Kodak did groundbreaking research there too. There were plenty of ways forward for Kodak that still would'v…

That was just one example of what the mission could have been. What should the mission have been?

My point is everyone can say they are betting on a non-changing thing and in retrospect it's easy to see what it could have been (in this case one of several, different ones). You've even expanded on "capturing memories" to make it "capturing images and memories" despite the fact they often have nothing to do with each other (medical imaging isn't related to memories, and diaries aren't related to images).

So what do they do? Go for the most abstract (read: big) mission possible? Why not "we are focused on making people happy". It doesn't change. People want and pay money for it.

Re: Betting on things that never change (2017)

#32

Post by danielmarkbruce »

thom wrote: post #28

Slightly tangential, but I definitely would prefer Amazon to offer less choice. Sure, give me every book in existence, but don’t give me 1000 options for a new cable or whatever, most of which are of questionable quality and have dozens of fake reviews. I’d much prefer fewer, more reliable options.

But that wouldn't fit with the great one's narrative :)

Jokes aside (Bezos is obviously brilliant), you have a very valid point. There are all kinds of studies showing the problems with large selection, and many companies are betting on something that won't change - many customers want a narrow selection. Steve Jobs and Apple is a decent example. Tesla is another. Wide selection didn't seem to do much good for GM and Ford.

Re: Betting on things that never change (2017)

#33

Post by danielmarkbruce »

sudosysgen wrote: post #27
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they would have invested a lot in digital cameras, executed well(?) and gone bankrupt. Mobile phones ended up eating cameras for all but very niche uses.

They'd probably become a pretty big fab outside of just making smartphone sensors. The business of memory would abstract into the business of information in general.

ha true! "We are in the information business". If only they'd known.

Re: Betting on things that never change (2017)

#34

Post by ngcc_hk »

jvanderbot wrote: post #3
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #2

Seems like a nice sounding narrative that doesn't really hold water, at least from a practical perspective. Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, AWS, Google Search and a lot of others - they were in fields changing all the time. Unless you define these very abstractly as "communication", "socializing", "entertainment", "compute infrastructure" and "finding things" and say "these things don't change in that they continue to hap…

Well, you've done a nice job of restating the article, actually. It claims that all seemingly revolutionary businesses were not successful because of the things that change (like technology solutions e.g., "finding things", "communication", "compute infrastructure" etc) but on the same unchanging principles (e.g., business opportunities and strategies). TFA / TL;DR: In the last 100 years we’ve gone from horses to jet…

Not sure about this list. I thought apple succeeded, as Thom put it as solving problem of users even though user may not even aware of it. Kodak did not. I am afraid toyota against Glasgow (hydrogen …) as well.

Customer customer customer …

Re: Betting on things that never change (2017)

#35

Post by dehrmann »

groby_b wrote: post #14
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is.. a weird spin. Kodak is a great long-term success story. Businesses aren't forever. If Kodak was in the "business of capturing memories", what would they have done differently?

If Kodak was in the "business of capturing memories", they wouldn't have dropped the technology for digital cameras. They wouldn't have been afraid of their own new tech (Kodak had digital camera technology in the early 70s) cannibalizing old tech (film), and instead invested in that segment. They wasted something like 25 years dragging their heels because they didn't realize that people don't use film because film i…

Digital cameras were really only viable from ~2000-2010. Kodak might have been able to move those boundaries a bit, but you need mass adoption of fast enough computers and cheap enough flash, and the smartphones killed digital point-and-shoots by 2010.

Re: Betting on things that never change (2017)

#37

Post by BBC-vs-neolibs »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #7
kqr wrote: post #6

Or as Deming put it: long-term successful organisations need to find their constancy of purpose . Kodak didn't find it: they were in the business of analogue film; they could have been in the business of capturing memories, and survived the digitalisation of photography. Manufacturers of carburetors generally didn't find it; they were in the business of carburetors, and not stochiometric mixtures of air and fuel, and…

This is.. a weird spin. Kodak is a great long-term success story. Businesses aren't forever. If Kodak was in the "business of capturing memories", what would they have done differently?

Kodak actually tried hard to bank on digital and made great digital sensors, but the world went too fast with digital. Their projections were off by a number of years. They thought film was going to gradually decline, not drop off a cliff.

Re: Betting on things that never change (2017)

#38

Post by Hypx_ »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #34
jvanderbot wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you've done a nice job of restating the article, actually. It claims that all seemingly revolutionary businesses were not successful because of the things that change (like technology solutions e.g., "finding things", "communication", "compute infrastructure" etc) but on the same unchanging principles (e.g., business opportunities and strategies). TFA / TL;DR: In the last 100 years we’ve gone from horses to jet…

Not sure about this list. I thought apple succeeded, as Thom put it as solving problem of users even though user may not even aware of it. Kodak did not. I am afraid toyota against Glasgow (hydrogen …) as well. Customer customer customer …

Hydrogen is going to displace batteries. The mistake is with companies who bet everything on li-ion batteries and not other ideas.
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