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Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
81–90 of 234 posts
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#82I (and I've noticed this in others my age) still have a lingering thought that photography is expensive, and to conserve 'film'. Back in the day, even with slides, the finished cost per slide was about a buck each. It's just hard to dispel the habitual thought "is this shot worth taking?" I'm still getting used to the ability to snap a pic and casually text it to a friend instead of trying to describe it. I just down…
Off topic, but would you mind naming the scanner app?
Microsoft's Office Lens is pretty good. There's also TinyScanner.
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#83I (and I've noticed this in others my age) still have a lingering thought that photography is expensive, and to conserve 'film'. Back in the day, even with slides, the finished cost per slide was about a buck each. It's just hard to dispel the habitual thought "is this shot worth taking?" I'm still getting used to the ability to snap a pic and casually text it to a friend instead of trying to describe it. I just down…
Off topic, but would you mind naming the scanner app?
CamScanner has been excellent for me. Anything less than $5 is a great deal for it.
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Off topic, but would you mind naming the scanner app?
Several showed up in the top business category, I picked one at random. I don't wish to endorse something I haven't used much nor have a basis for comparison. One thing about its operation that pleased me was it did a much better than expected job of removing the distortion from the page, one thing you won't get from just a photo. I did like the OCR feature, too. The others claimed to do the same thing.
Almost all apps seem to handle page orientation and correct it. However, I haven't come across any which can handle page curvature (like scanning a page from a book, instead of a single page document).
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#85I worked for Creo when it was acquired by Kodak in 2005 for $1B and then later for Kodak for quite a few years. At the time Kodak still had cash but film was obviously in decline. This acquisition was part of a $3B acquisition spree. Kodak's mangement proceeded to run Creo into the ground through a series of layoffs, remote micromanagement, shuffling things around etc. At the time of the acquisition Creo was profitab…
For context, Creo is the company founded by Dan Gelbart, the extremely accomplished guy who built a micron-precision metal-cutting lathe out of granite in his house: https://www.youtube.com/user/dgelbart
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#86I lived in Rochester, NY and got a 20 hr/week job interning at Kodak in the slide film research department during HS in 1999-2000. I remember on one occasion my boss, a mid-level executive (head of new slide film research? something like that) asked me what I thought about digital cameras, I think both because I was young and seen as "the computer guy". I didn't own one but I'd read about them a decent amount. I told…
Sometimes I think nostalgically about my DOS 16 bit programming skills - all quite useless today. It's hard to give that up.
Retro indie games are making a comeback.
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#87Thought experiment..even if you could time travel, how would you have saved Kodak?
Get Dick Merrill in there and take my chances on Kodak being able to make something of the Foveon sensor.
Mind you, at least Sigma managed to get the DP1/2/3M cameras out into the wild, and very nice they are too!
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma , is well worth reading. I don't think it's one of Christensen's examples (it's been a while since I read the book) but IMO the all-time greatest blunder of this type was Sears closing down their catalog operation the same year the first graphical web browser was introduced. The younger readers may not remember this, but there was a time when the Sears catalog sold everythi…
That puzzled me, too. Sears was the first company to figure out large scale order fulfillment, around 1890. They had the back end operation figured out. They had merchandise for everything you really need in stock. All they needed was online ordering, which is the easy part. What's left of Sears is now owned by K-Mart. (K-Mart is descended from S.S. Kresge, which operated "dime stores". Dime stores were like dollar s…
Worse, they figured harder problems out -- they had solved the delivery problem in suburban and rural areas for large items. there was a Sears franchise network where you could pick up stuff delivered by an 18 wheeler or rail rather than wait for parcel post or ups.
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#89This 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…
The way I remember 1985 is that "made in China" wasn't a phrase but "made in Japan" absolutely was, see forex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_%28film%29 and reckon that that didn't get made in a vacuum.
downsizing was also introduced around then - during the time of James Goldsmith and the corporate raiders
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Several showed up in the top business category, I picked one at random. I don't wish to endorse something I haven't used much nor have a basis for comparison. One thing about its operation that pleased me was it did a much better than expected job of removing the distortion from the page, one thing you won't get from just a photo. I did like the OCR feature, too. The others claimed to do the same thing.
Almost all apps seem to handle page orientation and correct it. However, I haven't come across any which can handle page curvature (like scanning a page from a book, instead of a single page document).
This one seems to do a credible job of fixing the curvature (what I meant by distortion).