81–90 of 240 posts
Not many people remember, but it wasn't that long ago that Kodak was "pivoting to crypto": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin At that point, it was pretty clear that they're on borrowed time. I'm surprised they had enough runway / credit to make it to 2025.
Crypto did pretty well during that timeframe. Likely, they didn't pivot hard enough to offset losses to the core business.
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Crypto did pretty well during that timeframe. Likely, they didn't pivot hard enough to offset losses to the core business.
Cryptocurrency did well, anyone who built things assuming crypto-related tech would do well lost their shirt.
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Heh, I was musing on something I'd read recently that had Kodak as a case study. It was compared with Instagram which had about 10-15 staff when it was bought for USD 1bn. WhatsApp similarly small. I hear tech can be big employers, maybe I'm overselling my point a bit there. That said, the trend is very much towards smaller operations, and a large headcount is not at all required for large money. My overall point is…
That's a challenging comparison, though, as Instagram never had to do fundamental research. They wrote an app. One that has to scale to enormous traffic, to be sure, but that came after they were a 10-15 person company. Meanwhile, Kodak was inventing lens technology and film chemistry and manufacturing processes and distribution channels. Similarly, Ford has more employees than Gran Turismo, but they're not in the sa…
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Kodak itself was the first to demonstrate a digital camera in 1975.[0] There is no one else to blame for any decisions. [0] https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/kodak-engineer-ha...
From the article it sounds like they had strong market share in Digital Cameras in the early 2000’s. What really killed then was phones becoming the dominant form factor
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What they actually fumbled was the transition to digital. Keeping analog film/camera assembly in the US would only have led to Kodak running out of money even sooner.
I don't know that they really fumbled anything. They had a pretty good set of digital cameras in the early 2000s. I owned one. It's just the technology that was the underpinning of the entire company has outlived its usefulness. You don't see many companies making horseshoes today - but there were thousands 150 years ago. They didn't fumble anything - just no longer needed.
That'd still be a big change of course, but it's better than not being a player.
Or they could've been Sony, who's now both a major player in cameras and supplying sensors to tons of other cameras.
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Crypto did pretty well during that timeframe. Likely, they didn't pivot hard enough to offset losses to the core business.
Cryptocurrency did well, anyone who built things assuming crypto-related tech would do well lost their shirt.
But the projects built on it are all questionable and only make money for the builders who slowly rug them
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Many tech companies still deal with physical goods and employ enough people to fill a city - but no longer in the US and Europe, generally. Whether we want them back is up to us.
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…
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Many tech companies still deal with physical goods and employ enough people to fill a city - but no longer in the US and Europe, generally. Whether we want them back is up to us.
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…
The US can align incentives to encourage different types of manufacturing of if it wants. I didn't say anything about whether it's a good idea.
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One important point I think is that Kodak, at its core, was a huge company specialized in photography related chemistry . Not easy to turn a company around when the knowledge/qualifications/experience of most of your employees becomes almost worthless. Thats also what made it easier for others (like Corning) to pivot (presumably).
Fujifilm recognized that they were a chemistry company and partially pivoted to cosmetics.