

Kodak’s First Digital Moment - tysone
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/kodaks-first-digital-moment/

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thisjustinm
I spent 7 years (02-09) working for Kodak in their Windsor, CO manufacturing
plant. It was an incredible lesson in [not] taking risks that I'll never
forget.

The writing was certainly on the wall about the digital photography revolution
when I started but nevertheless every year the story was the same as the
losses continued to mount: "Digital continues to eat into our film business
faster than we have predicted. We've accelerated our plans [to switch to
digital] for next year."

Meanwhile, in the middle of all that I remember picking up the WSJ and reading
an interview with Netflix's Reed Hastings. They had just debuted streaming and
were fielding questions from reporters asking if they were worried about
cannibalizing their successful DVD business. Reed's response was "We have to
obsolete ourselves before someone else does."

I cut the article out and hung it in my office at Kodak with that quote
highlighted. It was pretty well faded when I finally took it down, laid off as
a part of another "digital transformation" restructuring.

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Aloha
Kodak could have owned this market, Xerox could have owned personal computing,
etc, there are stories like this all over where a big dominant company invents
the next generation of technology, but because of internal company forces cant
(or wont) actually bring it in a meaningful way.

Kodak couldn't deal with cannibalizing their existing business (for film, and
less extent, printing supplies) and Xerox sales couldn't wean itself off the
'click' (per imprint commission) enough to figure out how to sell the PC.

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jedrek
_Kodak could have owned this market_

People keep saying that, but it doesn't check out. Look at who owns the camera
market: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax, Olympus and Apple.

None of these companies are new, two thirds of them had huge analog camera
businesses 30 years ago. The major shift in digital photography was people
going from spending $500 on a camera and $1000 on film and $1000 on
processing, to spending $1000 on a camera and $500 on a computer.

Now, I bet Kodak could have done very well as a sensor supplier (like Sony or
Samsung), but thinking that they could've somehow "owned this market"... It's
been 15 years since Nikon released the first pro DSLR (D1) and Canon released
the first affordable DSLR (the Canon D30), and look how many competitors are
chomping at their heels. That's because Nikon and Canon both have lens systems
with a huge range of glass, much of it designed before 1999. If you bought a
D1 or D30, you could go to your local camera store and pick up everything from
a super-wide to a long telephoto. Kodak had none of that.

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Aloha
Kodak did have a near monopoly in consumer cameras though, and they could have
had a monopoly in sensors too - what they could have done by leading it rather
than playing catchup is changing how adoption worked.

Had Kodak led it, we for example might print a ton more digital photography
than we do now, because the charge was instead lead by Sony (in my opinion)
and their early mavica - and for a long time you couldn't print digital photos
onto real photo paper using a lasting process - because kodak controlled
something like 70% of the processing market, they could have led the ability
to print in store.

As it was, high quality printing from digital didn't come until much later.

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Animats
Kodak did lead in digital cameras. Their $17K digital camera for news
photographers in 1994 was the first digital camera that took good pictures and
was reasonably compact. (Kodak's 1991 model required a backpack for data
storage.)

But Kodak didn't get the price down. Casio, Sony, and Kyocera did. In 1999,
Nikon came out with the D1, the first good DLSR, and the beginning of the end
of pro film photography. It's the five years between 1994 and 1999 that Kodak
blew it.

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rmason
This story is the precise reason why innovation usually comes from outside,
from the startup. Why did Mercedes see value in Tesla's technology while the
Big 3 did not? It pains me greatly to see the tech leadership mantle in
automobiles slowly pass from Michigan to California.

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arrrg
Nikon is a startup?

The camera market is dominated by big companies. And not only that, many of
those companies were actually also big film camera companies. Obviously
there’s Nikon and Canon. Sony (which has been coming out with some wickedly
cool and innovative digital cameras and certainly worked its way up to become
a huge digital camera company) is not an analoge camera company, but it’s also
not a small company.

The biggest disruption to the (low end of the) camera market have probably
been smartphones and their cameras. (The market segment of cheap point and
shoot cameras is practically dead and camera makers have already moved on to
new and certainly more exciting products, targeting a very different
audience.) That’s chiefly Apple and Samsung (as the biggest drivers of
bringing smartphones with good enough cameras to everyone), certainly not
small startups.

Even the hippest of the hip current digital cameras tend to be made by some
really, really old companies that have been making cameras (and analog film!)
for ages, namely Fujifilm (it’s right in the name!) and Olympus.

Selling cameras is still dangerous terrain and I think it pays off to have
great ideas and to know your audience, but some very old and very big
companies have been quite excellent at doing that, actually. Of course, all
around them there has been lots of death and destruction (including Kodak),
but that doesn’t mean no one made it.

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rodgerd
> Sony (which has been coming out with some wickedly cool and innovative
> digital cameras and certainly worked its way up to become a huge digital
> camera company) is not an analoge camera company

It's not, but it did buy one of the (fading) high-end camera businesses to get
access to an SLR system and lens portfolio that they used grant them the
credibility they needed to base their current charge on.

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arrrg
I know! (I didn’t mention it because my comment was getting long enough
already.) It seems if you can’t sell to the low end you absolutely need to
show off your analog film chops in some way to be really taken seriously. Or
at least you had to. (I mean, Sony’s current cameras are certainly thoroughly
modern and you can’t really accuse them of nostalgia.)

~~~
rodgerd
Yeah, although their lens strategy seems a bit of a mess - Minolta, Alpha, and
Alpha Full-Frame.

