
Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? - lawpoop
Most are familiar with the fact that Kodak developed the first digital camera in the 70s, and then never followed up on it, eventually becoming bankrupt as film became obsolete.<p>I&#x27;m interested in an &#x27;insider&#x27; account of what was going on at Kodak during the rise of digital. My naive assumption is a bunch of 60+ executives with a 1950&#x27;s mindset of &quot;We&#x27;re Kodak&quot;, and some junior execs proposed projects that are either ignored or ridiculed.<p>But I wonder, what really happened? Is there a source or interviews or the like? What were they saying in the meetings while digital products were hitting the market?
======
intrasight
This 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 staggered in 7 minute increments to manage traffic flow.

That none of that would exist 20 years later was inconceivable at the time.
The word "disruption" wasn't in business vocabulary. Nor was the phrase "made
in China". Some senior technical managers saw the "digital" writing on the
wall. But what could they do? What could anyone do? There was no way to turn
that aircraft carrier on a dime.

At the end of my summer internship, I attended a presentation that our small
team gave to more senior managers at the top of Kodak Tower in the conference
room adjacent to President Chandler's office. One of the managers took me to
the window and pointed out to me different plants and facilities of the vast
Kodak empire spread out across the Rochester region. I assumed like many that
Kodak had a bright future ahead because they had a world-renowned brand and
excellent scientists and engineers. What many at the time didn't yet recognize
was that there was no business model in digital cameras that would employ 100
thousand engineers, managers, factory workers, technicians, and staff. There
were certainly no senior managers willing or able to sacrifice the golden
goose of film to pursue something entirely different.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_%28film%29)
and reckon that that didn't get made in a vacuum.

~~~
alister
Not only was "made in Japan" established by 1985, but it was already thought
to be superior in popular culture:

In Back to the Future Part III, Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown--the 1955 version of
himself--discovers that the DeLorean time machine car has broken down because
of a faulty chip made in 1985.

Doc Brown: _Unbelievable that this little piece of junk could be such a big
problem. No wonder this circuit failed. It says, "Made in Japan."_

Marty McFly: _What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan. "_

~~~
rasz_pl
That might be a cute joke, but a better indication would be VHS camera used in
the first Back to the future movie - 1984 made in Japan JVC GR-C1. The cool
innovative tech gizmo wasnt US made.

------
Syzygies
My dad devised the "Bayer filter" used in digital cameras, in the 1970's in
the Kodak Park Research Labs. It is hard to convey now exactly how remote and
speculative the idea of a digital camera was then. The HP-35 calculator was
the cutting edge, very expensive consumer electronics of the day; the idea of
an iPhone was science fiction. Simply put, my dad was playing.

This was the decade that the Hunt brothers were cornering the silver market.
Kodak's practical interest in digital methods was to use less silver while
keeping customers happy. The idea was for Kodak to insert a digital step
before printing enlargements, to reduce the inevitable grain that came with
using less silver. Black and white digital prints were scattered about our
home, often involving the challenging textural details of bathing beauties on
rugs.

~~~
rplst8
Your dad is Bryce Bayer?

~~~
jonahrd
Sometimes things are made by teams of people

~~~
Syzygies
My dad Bryce Bayer (Kodak Rochester) worked closely with Phil Powell (Kodak
England) throughout this period. I don't know what Phil Powell specifically
contributed to the 'Bayer filter'. I do know that my dad would have liked to
have shared credit for all related work on digital photography, but that Kodak
Rochester did not want to share credit with Kodak England. I'm also a
mathematician, and I see how the details may be beside the point: When one
grows a tree together, one wants to view all fruit of the tree as shared.

------
thisjustinm
I worked for Kodak from 2002-2009 in their Windsor, CO plant, in the Thermal
Media Manufacturing division and also wrote the occasional post for the
corporate blog (thermal media == Dye sublimation printer media used in Kodak
Picture Kiosks mainly). AMA.

It was the same thing every year - digital is cannibalizing film faster than
we thought, we need to close down X or lay off N people. A year or two of that
sure but over and over again and it became clear the executives were just not
getting it. Looking back I wonder if they just decided to slowly ride the ship
down, extracting nice salaries along the way. I still can't understand how
someone - activist shareholders, a board member with half a brain, an
executive willing to speak out - didn't make a bigger stink and try to get
fresh leadership.

I remember one year at an all division meeting they showed the latest
corporate "motivational" video - "Winds of Change"
([http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JYW49bsiP4k](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JYW49bsiP4k)).
We thought finally, they get it and are admitting we've been stagnating and
now we're gonna turn it all around. Everyone was super pumped up for weeks.

Then we realized the only thing that had changed was our ad agency who had
produced the video.

~~~
bkjelden
Do you know what happened to the facilities? I'd imagine Kodak's 2nd largest
manufacturing facility had quite a footprint.

~~~
slang800
According to [http://bizwest.com/deconstruction-on-kodak-
campus/](http://bizwest.com/deconstruction-on-kodak-campus/), demolition began
on 2011-06-01, but that didn't get rid of the entire campus, since a few
buildings were still being used. In 2012 Kodak sold 320 acres of it to become
a part of the 1,800-acre Great Western Industrial Park [0][1]. In 2013 they
sold of the last 200-person facility (which makes Kodak kiosk media) to the
"U.K. Kodak Pension Plan", which has kept it running [2].

So there probably aren't any cool abandoned buildings there... The only one
I've been able to find is [Kodak building
nine]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_building_nine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_building_nine))
in Ontario.

[0]: [http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/kodak-s-windsor-
locatio...](http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/kodak-s-windsor-location-to-
become-industrial-park)

[1]:
[http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2012/01/19/halliburto...](http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2012/01/19/halliburton-
plans-54-acre-storage.html)

[2]: [http://www.denverpost.com/2014/01/20/200-kodak-alaris-
jobs-r...](http://www.denverpost.com/2014/01/20/200-kodak-alaris-jobs-remain-
in-windsor-after-sale-2/)

~~~
thisjustinm
Thanks for these links, I hadn't been back in a long while and this fills in
the gaps of what's happened since I left. Glad to see C29 still stands and is
in use even if it's days are certainly numbered.

------
afian
From the warren buffet autobiography ...

“What about Kodak? asked Bill Ruane. He looked back at Gates to see what he
would say. “Kodak is toast,” said Gates.8 Nobody else in the Buffett Group
knew that digital technology would make film cameras toast. In 1991, even
Kodak didn’t know that it was toast.9 “Bill probably thinks all the television
networks are going to get killed,” said Larry Tisch, whose company, Loews
Corp., owned a stake in the CBS network. “No, it’s not that simple,” said
Gates. “The way networks create and expose shows is different than camera
film, and nothing is going to come in and fundamentally change that.”

“You’ll see some falloff as people move toward variety, but the networks own
the content and they “can repurpose it. The networks face an interesting
challenge as we move the transport of TV onto the Internet. But it’s not like
photography, where you get rid of film so knowing how to make film becomes
absolutely irrelevant."

Check out this book on the iBooks Store:
[https://itun.es/us/hj_bz.l](https://itun.es/us/hj_bz.l)

Excerpt From: Schroeder, Alice. “The Snowball.” Bantam Books, 2009. iBooks.

~~~
porsupah
Even amongst more technically minded folk, there were some having difficulty
accepting that the technical challenges facing digital photography would, in
fact, be overcome. Here's quite an interesting thread from rec.photo, Dec 1990
onwards, discussing just that.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.photo/ZnqcQVzAln...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.photo/ZnqcQVzAln0)

~~~
CapitalistCartr
"Right now, 1 Megabyte of memory costs about $45 retail. This will not drop by
an order of magnitude in the next decade without a breakthrough, or an
economical Gallium-Arsenide process to replace Silicon."

I love this line. Even in 1990 people didn't believe Moore's Law.

~~~
fanf2
1990 was weird for memory prices because they were just recovering from memory
shortages and price hikes. See this chart
[http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm](http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm) and this
newspaper article from the time
[http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/25/business/shortage-of-
chips...](http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/25/business/shortage-of-chips-is-
easing.html)

------
themgt
I 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 him I
understood they were expensive/low-quality at the moment but the advantage of
ditching film and using ever-improving digital tech still seemed huge. I don't
remember his exact words, but he couldn't really see the appeal or promise.

The 7-story building I worked in is just a mound of grass last I looked. I
have thought from time to time just about the institutional inertia that
fights against seeing what's going on and adapting. There were just tens of
thousands of people with very highly specialized skills around film and
chemicals and processing and dark rooms and paper and so many things most of
which simply aren't relevant to a digital photography world.

Now, granted, other film/pre-digital camera companies did a far better job
making the jump. I'd argue maybe in part again that Kodak seeing itself as
emotionally wed to __film __while other companies saw themselves moreso as
camera /photo companies. That Fuji has been able to survive is more surprising
to me than Canon/Nikon/Olympus/etc.

~~~
rrrx3
I had never really put much thought into it, but you're totally right- the
expectation was that a chemical company (essentially) would transform itself
into a Hardware & software manufacturer. That's a might, mighty leap. That
Fuji was actually able to do it is even more impressive.

I worked for a company that did some work for Kodak - both directly and
indirectly - around some of their software initiatives & partnerships with
mobile manufacturers. They were not pretty or well-run projects, to be sure.

~~~
ghaff
Certainly Kodak did a lot of things wrong but there's a common meme straight
out of Marketing Myopia [1] that, had they only thought of themselves as a
photography company rather than a film company, all would have been well. This
is basically nonsense.

Even had Kodak been more aggressive about cannibalizing its film sales with
digital, it's unclear how much of its expertise and competitive advantage
would have carried over. In any case, it wouldn't have nearly replaced the
film consumables business in terms of revenue and profit.

Fujifilm did do better--mostly, current camera line notwithstanding--by
branching out into other areas of chemistry. Good read from The Economist here
[2] but Fujifilm had tough times too and I believe that they were also
significantly smaller.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_myopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_myopia)

[2]
[http://www.economist.com/node/21542796?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/the...](http://www.economist.com/node/21542796?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/thelastkodakmoment)

[Second link fixed.]

~~~
shalmanese
I always wondered, if you're an executive with perfect foresight and your
analysis shows that you could either cling to your legacy technology and make
a billion dollars for 10 years and then zero dollars after that as the
inevitable disruption happened or go all in on self-disruption and make 100
million dollars until the end of time, which would really be the better
choice?

Given that disrupting yourself would have a 100 year payoff period, it seems
far better to try and squash any attempts at change, both internally and
externally until progress becomes inevitable. Look at the music industry for
example, even a few extra years of CD dominance would exceed the profits of
all digital music sales ever.

Of course, if you go this route, your incentive is to play clueless and out of
touch since even giving credence to the disruptive idea hastens it's arrival.
I'm sure there were a lot of executives who were genuinely clueless but this
at least shows how otherwise intelligent executives would have a strong
incentive to act clueless.

~~~
jwatte
Intel is next.

They're making billions on big, complex, expansive CPUs. Someone like ARM
/will/ replace them, at a much smaller dollar volume.

~~~
frankchn
I am not so sure, mainly because a lot of Intel's advantage comes from its
process technology. The ARM instruction set might well take over, but you
still need someone to make them.

Even at the current 14/16nm nodes, Intel's process is significantly smaller
than TSMC or Samsung's [1]. I suspect we will see consolidation (a la
GloFo/Samsung) and Intel branching out into being a foundry, but with building
10nm++ fabs running into the billions of dollars, I don't see Intel going
anywhere any time soon.

[1]: [http://newstechnow.com/plans-launch-14nm-finfet-
technology-c...](http://newstechnow.com/plans-launch-14nm-finfet-technology-
chip-in-2015)

~~~
majewsky
> The ARM instruction set might well take over

 _looks around himself_

It hasn't already?

------
bendykstra
My high school physics teacher worked at Kodak's research labs on CCDs,
including some that were for use in "specialized applications," which I assume
to mean spy satellites†. He said that he had quit when Kodak decided to stop
shooting themselves in the foot and shot themselves in the head instead. That
would have been the early 90s, I think. I don't have any specific
mismanagement stories, but I'll send you his email address (the most recent
that I could find.) I always wished that he would talk about it in more detail
and now that it is some years later, maybe he will.

† He told us one fun story. One of his research papers had been cleared by the
censors for publication and accepted by a scientific journal. However, just
before the journal went to print, the censors changed their minds. It was too
late to fix the layout, so the edition was released with a sheaf of blank
pages in the middle. He said that it was the proudest anyone had ever been of
some blank paper.

Edit: Apparently, there is no way to private message an HN user. If you have a
Reddit account or similar, I can pm you there.

~~~
dasmoth
Kodak was always a big part of US IMINT capabilities. Before CCDs, they were
making specialised films for the film-return spacecraft, and operating the
facility where it was processed. There's some interesting stuff in the
declassified NRO histories about upgrades to the film emulsions -- which I'm
sure filtered through into Kodak's civilian products (e.g tabular grains).

While it seems likely that they remained involved in sensors and also optics,
I wonder whether the loss of these secret film contracts may have left them
weakened in the late 80s/early 90s (last film-return satellite should have
flown in 1986, but was lost due to a launch failure), just when they needed to
focus on some new product lines.

~~~
brudgers
The end of the Cold War probably wasn't all that good for people in the
National Security segment of the remote imaging business, either.

------
brudgers
Ten years ago, "the mobile web" might have been a reference to WAP. Nine years
ago, when the iPhone arrived, mobile web was Edge: where you could get it and
when you could afford it.

Companies like RIM and Nokia had smartphones. The people running them were
smart. Their engineering was good. It had to be because wireless access to the
internet wasn't ubiquitous. Suddenly the companies faced the first mover
disadvantage.

It's difficult to imagine how revolutionary the technology of Kodachrome was.
It utterly disrupted consumer photography and photojournalism and professional
photography. The fact that Kodak was experimenting with digital photography in
the 1970's shows how out front they were and they were right to treat it as a
technology that wouldn't be viable for more than two decades...and one that
nobody has figured out how to monitize except via the sale of hardware.

There's probably no plausible alternate universe where Kodak managed to
produce sustainable profit from processing and storing digital images or
selling media or anything related to their core business. Digital photography
moved image production out of retail channels. I could text an image to ten of
my relatives without a trip to Walgreens for one hour processing, and $0.08
3x5 prints in an hour available in the mid 1990's was a pretty amazing
innovation versus the four or five days and significantly higher prices that
were typical in the 70's and 80's.

Kodak wasn't a company standing still. It just didn't have a good way to make
money from digital imagery: HP had them beat in the printer ink as liquid gold
market and the camera manufacturers weren't going anywhere: optics are still
bounded by the physics of optics.

Circling back, I think it wasn't so much people sitting around and thinking
"we're Kodak" as it was the fact that Kodak wasn't Nokia and hence didn't have
a history of selling off it's mainline business and moving into a new
industry. Not that as a publicly traded company in the US that would have ever
really been a viable option. Quarter by quarter, Kodak was obligated to
maximize stockholder value for the short rather than long term.

Companies become obsolescent. Consider Sun.

------
aaronbrethorst
There are quite a few articles online that go into some detail about it. Just
search for "Kodak Clay Christensen", or something similar. Here's one:
[http://www.economist.com/node/21542796](http://www.economist.com/node/21542796)

    
    
        Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its
        executives “suffered from a mentality of perfect products,
        rather than the high-tech mindset of make it, launch it,
        fix it...”
        
        Bad luck played a role, too. Kodak thought that the thousands
        of chemicals its researchers had created for use in film
        might instead be turned into drugs. But its pharmaceutical
        operations fizzled, and were sold in the 1990s.
    

On a related note, I just purchased a 10 pack of Kodak Portra 400 4x5" sheet
film last night. I normally shoot Kodak's Tri-X and 5222 cine film, or Fuji's
Acros 100, but thought it'd be fun to get into large format color photography
on occasion.

~~~
Turing_Machine
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 _everything_. You could even buy an
entire pre-cut house that would be shipped to you for assembly.

They basically had Amazon, and threw it away. Now they're essentially nothing
but a subsidiary brand of K-Mart.

~~~
Animats
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 stores,
before inflation.) Now they can go down together.

~~~
Spooky23
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.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Yep. Those were called "catalog stores", as I recall, and if you had your item
sent to the catalog store shipping was free (or maybe reduced price -- it's
been a long time, but there was definitely some kind of break on shipping
costs).

~~~
Spooky23
I think they had a dock and you could get really big items too. IIRC, the
farmer I worked for picked up a giant generator on a flatbed at one of these
places.

Not sure if that was a Sears purchase or not though.

------
YZF
I 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 profitable (though definitely with some challenges)
and had a few growth initiatives that looked promising (all cancelled). Very
capable management, good people, and well run. There were a lot of
opportunities to create some long term value in different areas but the only
Kodak strategy was to keep cost cutting and milk all the businesses to their
death.

What was amazing to me is that the CEO kept his job even after Kodak's market
cap went below $1B. I forget what that market cap was at the time of the
acquisition but probably in the $10-$20B range. Gotta be one of the top ten
value destroying CEOs of all times.

For many many years it didn't matter what management did, film kept printing
money for the company. Only when things changed you could tell that management
was actually incompetent. Before that you didn't need to be competent to keep
making money. Kind of like Warren Buffet says, only when the tide goes out you
find who is swimming without their bathing suits...

I just saw something on Bloomberg the other day about Kodak finally getting
some anti-counterfeiting technology that AFAIK is the same one developed in
Creo over 10 years ago (Traceless) released.

EDIT: Another personal anecdote is that the first "real" digital camera I ever
used, I'm guessing around 1996, was a Kodak. It was pretty decent. I think the
price tag was quite high. At that point in time Kodak had a good reputation in
digital cameras. The problem is digital cameras would never replace film as a
business even if Kodak went 100% into digital. They needed to diversify.

~~~
mattmcknight
"The problem is digital cameras would never replace film as a business even if
Kodak went 100% into digital. They needed to diversify."

In my short time in business, I have noticed how rare it is for a company to
successfully get smaller and survive- even when the obvious business is going
away.

~~~
jzwinck
If you have 1000 mid-level managers, how many of them can you get on board
with a plan to end up with 300 mid-level managers? The ones who do not get on
board are a huge cost that your competitors don't have to offset in their top
line.

------
WalterBright
I (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 downloaded a phone app that turns it into a scanner, complete with OCR.
It's not as good as my flatbed, but it's incredibly convenient.

I feel like I'm living in the future.

~~~
gkya
Off topic, but would you mind naming the scanner app?

~~~
WalterBright
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.

~~~
nileshtrivedi
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).

~~~
WalterBright
This one seems to do a credible job of fixing the curvature (what I meant by
distortion).

------
QueueUnderflow
Steven Sasson, the man who invented the camera gave a talk to my program (CE
at Rochester Institute of Tech) about the process and downfall of his
invention at Kodak. It all started as some backroom research project with no
funding to see if they could do something with the new technology of CDC
cells. The camera ended up at .01 Megapixels and stored on a tape (with about
20+ second write time). What most people did not realize is he also made a
device for displaying the image onto a TV (what good is a digital image if
there is no way to display it). IIRC the first "public" demo of this
technology was during the Tiananmen Square Massacre to smuggle/transmit the
video out of the county. If you watch one of the original broadcasts the only
sign of it was a little Kodak logo at the bottom of the screen. Now there is
something you need to know about film.... it was probably one of the most
profitable products ever. Also Kodak was not really a pure technology company,
it was more of a consumer tech/chemical company. While they did have a lot of
engineers (many of my professors all worked there), some were more focused on
the manufacturing process rather than an end product. A lot of their internal
structure was focused on making and processing chemical film. When he showed
this product to the upper level (however never the CEO) the demo went
something like: walk into room with the camera, take picture of attendees,
show picture on TV. While this was totally unheard of the time, mostly they
all just laughed at the quality of the image and brushed it off. They also saw
no appeal in viewing pictures on a TV screen vs an actual picture. A patent
was filed and that was mostly the end of it. A lot of people laugh at Kodak
for that mistake, but it really it’s just another example of the inventors
dilemma. At that time though it made perfect sense for Kodak to make that
decision because they were just making so much money. One could say the
technology was ahead of its time. Well then digital really started to take
rise. They ended up turning a lot of their focus into making personal photo
printers. In 2004 Kodak then realized that almost every company that made a
digital camera infringed on their patents and started to sue them all. They
ended up winning a lot of money but they could never get their foot back into
the market. TLDR: Camera was ahead of its time and threatened to undo the
whole company whose main focus was producing and processing chemical film.

------
lordnacho
I don't see it as so much of a failure of management.

To grab a large slice of some niche, you need to be invested in exploiting it.
In Kodak's case, that meant having all these huge facilities for film
technology. There's no other way to be a big player in this niche. The upside
is nobody will ever avoid thinking of your brand when they are shopping for
film.

The downside is you can't just change direction. If film becomes obsolete, the
market in the replacement is not going to be big enough at the stage when you
can see it. And its size is in itself what you will be using to judge whether
it will happen, so it's quite hard to decide to dump all the old tech in
favour of a tiny industry that might run into trouble. I'm sure there were
many naysayers pointing out various flaws and potential roadblocks with
digital.

If you do change direction, you inevitable step on the toes of someone else in
the value chain. You make your own camera, you annoy the camera manufacturers.
You want to be a chemicals business? It's full here, too. Remember you're a
huge operation, and there's only so many things to do.

We should not mourn the death of large corporations though. Just like in
nature, it frees up resources for new players doing new things.

~~~
themtutty
Except when the retirement and health benefits of 10% of the entire city is
eliminated, so that the CEO can still get his $5M "performance bonus". That's
not exactly efficient use of capital.

------
earthserver
It's worth noting that Eastman Chemical, which was spun off from Kodak in
1994, is doing just fine as a Fortune 500 company with about 15,000 employees
and a market cap of $10B USD.

It's stock is up some 200%+ since the spin-off from Kodak in '94 (compared to
400%+ for the S&P500).

If you had kept your Eastman Chemical stock after the spin-off from Kodak in
'94, sold your Kodak stock, and reinvested the proceeds into Eastman Chemical,
you would have more than doubled your capital, not including dividends.

------
rando444
Digital cameras in the 70s and 80s were impractical, low quality devices that
were mostly useless without a computer, which is not something that the
majority of people had in their homes.

Kodak did follow up with digital though. They had a digital SLR by 1994
(before Canon or Nikon) and digital cameras for $299 by 1996.

The advantage that companies like Nikon and Canon had are their lenses, and
the huge investments photographers made in their lenses is what locked them in
to a particular brand.

This is why a lot of traditional camera companies (Konica, Minolta, Fuji,
Polaroid) were unable to keep up.

~~~
cpks
Minolta had rather astonishingly good lenses, actually. They had a number of
oddballs, from an STF lens (great bokeh) to a tiny 500mm autofocus mirror lens
(with very good image quality -- not the reputation mirror lenses have), and
many others.

~~~
sgt101
And Minolta is now Sony I think?

------
hemancuso
Grew up in Rochester. Both my father and Grandfather did about 30 years at
Kodak at a fairly high level.

How can you transition from the highest margin CPG product of all time to a
new regime where there are almost no marginal costs per use? Kodak had well
over 100k employees at its peak and was a global brand just like coke. They
even saw their demise decades before it occurred.

But what is management supposed to do in a quarterly environment where CEOs
are getting ousted other than double down on their success and cut costs?
There was never any real money to be made in digital photography and if anyone
was going to figure it out, they certainly weren't living in Rochester.

------
DoubleGlazing
I worked for Kodak UK for a few months in 2002. I was a contractor working on
their ERP systems, specifically reporting and BI tools. I wasn't privy to
anything strategic but I could see some odd things.

The oddest thing was that they were still trying hard to push the APS format,
despite the fact that is was a pretty poor format when it first came out it
was now looking even worse when compared to early mass market digital cameras.

There was a certain arrogance amongst higher up managers. A sort of "We're
Kodak, we're the best, we dictate the market!" There was a noticeable staff
churn problem as a result. I was on a team of 20 of which 14 were contractors.

I can see some interesting parallels between Kodak and Nokia. Two giants who
dominated their sectors and just didn't anticipate changes in consumer demand
and then couldn't/wouldn't adapt.

------
mxwll
Recent design grad from RIT. I learned from / worked with many former Kodak
employees from the late 90's into early 00's. The majority of them worked on
the consumer product side of the business.

It is my understanding that Kodak's efforts were too little too late. The
organization was driven by the business people and was hemorrhaging money and
only staying afloat through licensing and selling off their patent portfolio
and the medical imaging devision. They watched their consumer product profits
from film evaporate and failed to transition into the digital age.

These designers and engineers that I have learned from and worked with are
certainly brilliant individuals. It seems that the organizational culture did
not provide them with the creative freedom needed to envision and develop
products competitive with those coming from smaller, nimbler companies.

------
mathattack
Here is the irony.... They were not too late, they were too early. [0] Their
CEO pushed hard in digital from the early 90s, but they couldn't handle the
losses. This is an example of a company's executives seeing the right thing,
but not being able to survive the losses until the market caught up.

[0]
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB869781042786228000](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB869781042786228000)

------
miesman
I worked for a subsidiary of Kodak around 91' and can offer a small view. My
impression was that they were very aware of what was coming. They came out
with the PhotoCD during this time. If you look at it was really a way to lock
people into film for a longer time since you still needed to take your
negatives in to be transferred.

I also remember taking a photography class in 95 and having the teacher say
right at the beginning that in 10 years everything is going to be digital. My
impression of the time is that everyone knew what was coming.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_They came out with the PhotoCD during this time._

I used a follow-on product called Picture CD, which was an _epic fail_ as far
as I was concerned[1].

You paid an extra $7 IIRC when you had your film developed, and you got JPEGs
on a CD. I gave them 35 mm print film and they gave me back 1024×1536
resolution JPEGs? That was literally worse resolution than the Canon S110
pocket camera I had then.

They got $7 out of me. Once.

The unwashed masses won't pay an extra $7 for a CD to go along with their
prints, which probably cost about them about $7 for the roll (about $0.20 or
$0.25 per print IIRC). They were being asked to pay double the total price.

More knowledgeable customers won't pay an extra $7 for such low resolution
scans.

So who was this product for? I would have probably tried Photo CD but I think
that was much more of a niche product and I didn't know about it. The mini-
labs were only offering Picture CD. The services I used were usually 1 or 2
day (which meant actual processing was off-site), so they certainly could have
been set up to do much higher quality scans than that.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_CD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_CD)

~~~
lmm
I paid for it. The quality was pretty poor, but it beat scanning pictures
myself (don't think I even owned a scanner at that time), and as a result I
still have photos from 15-odd years ago that would almost certainly have been
lost in my house moves since then otherwise.

------
vibrolax
Rochester NY resident since 1982, Kodak's peak employment year. Wrote embedded
software for Xerox for a couple years around 2000. My belief is that companies
like Kodak, Xerox, HP, IBM, etc. have business structures that cannot survive
in a low margin business. These companies drove and thrived with technological
change for decades. The leadership could not accept the change of their key
lines of business into low margin commodities.

~~~
rgovind
If that is true, I believe Google, MS wold have a similar problem but Amazon
won''t

~~~
vibrolax
Google's cash cow product is knowledge of people's behaviors. Can equivalent
product be built for much less, or be much easier to use? MS seems eager to
build a similar business. Amazon store seems built to survive at a near zero
margin. Maybe AWS as well.

I think Amazon's ultimate success is predicated on eventually developing a
higher margin business.

It seems many previous businesses founded on the low cost producer strategy,
e.g. Dell, uses it as a means to get scale, then emphasise higher margin
products and services.

------
timbarrett
Spent a 3 weeks integrating the kodak robotic microfilm system with VMS based
Vax in a joint bid with Kodak and Digital in this time frame. This system was
supposed to save kodak. The Kodak VP of Government Systems from Washington
flew in to "supervise" and royally screwed everything up. Guy was the biggest
nut bag in the world.

------
bksteele
Interesting and sad too. I worked there from 1987 to 1996 mostly in the film
business. However, the lab I worked in used digital imaging to analyze and
measure silver halide grains used to make film emulsion! So we were well aware
of progress being made in digital imaging.

When I got to photocd, the management’s focus was on replicating the quality
and detail of film in the digital space, and they did not notice/understand
that the lower level of quality of digital would still be useful. Their
marketing was driven too much by the voices of professional photography and
the ad industry’s need for the quality capability of enlargement.

My colleagues and I actually started work on a business plan to use lower
resolution digital imaging for applications in real estate and other
industries that could use snapshots of lower resolution. We had really just
gotten started on this, when management found out via a personal dispute of
one of my colleagues and hauled us in for discipline. We stated our case and
said we thought Kodak should get involved, but that fell on deaf ears. Our
group fell apart when Kodak did not renew one of our contracts, and he went to
work for Sony writing their digital image storage software, which became one
of the top tools at that time.

The impression I got was that upper management was well aware of the digital
advance but completely oblivious to the speed of its progress. They thought in
terms of the huge length of time it took to develop new film products and
their associated factories. In 1992, they actually thought that digital would
not be a serious threat until about 2005. Oops!

------
_ph_
I have no inside information what so ever, but I am still today using a
digital camera with a Kodak sensor almost daily (a M9). I am still baffled,
how a company of this size and revenue can fall apart like this - probably
only paralleled by the demise of Nokia. Till the early 2000s, Kodak was not
only a leader in film but also in digital photography. Their CCD sensors are
still made today, their sensor division now owned by OnSemi.

All the first Nikon and Canon DSLRs had Kodak technology in them. Not sure how
things happened in detail, but eventually Nikon and Canon had their own
digital technology, mostly based on CMOS sensors. Kodak had one more CMOS
camera of their own - the 14n based on a Nikon body. But while being the
highest resolution body at that time, it got mixed reviews. Still at that time
Kodak probably would have had enough cash to buy Nikon.

Yet they withdrew from professional digital cameras, the last life sign was
providing sensors for the Leica M9 and S. And with no other leg to stand on,
the company mostly vanished with the collapse of the film market.

Ironically, the price you pay per roll of film is on an all-time high, so in
theory, the business of making film should be more profitable than it was, but
the scale just is not there any more.

~~~
SoapSeller
OnSemi are retiring their CCD offering, IIRC they will stop producing CCD
sensors by the end of this year.

~~~
fezz
As are Sony.

------
Broken_Hippo
This isn't exactly insider, but offhand experience. I worked at a pharmacy
from 2005-2013 that had Kodak film processing and digital printing machines.
Early on, there was a still a great deal of actual film. Digital cameras still
were expensive or not rivaling the quality of film. Many machines didn't offer
negative-to-cd, but offered a floppy disk. This slow updating of their
equipment was a theme in the company. As film sales slowed, Kodak grew worse.
Outsourced tech support for the machines, who were graded on whether or not
they had to send a technician out to the store. That was switched to another
system, where a tech called back. Most times this was recorded as done, but
wasn't. This sort of thing was very common, and didn't improve as they sold
off and outsourced bits of the company. They did finally start updating
machines, and having fewer locations that processed film quickly and phased
out send-away processing - truly focusing on digital products. By then, their
advantage had slipped. While they relied on quality film before, their prints
seemed no better quality than competitors.

Part of the problem was obviously that they didn't take digital seriously soon
enough. This in combination with what seemed like a poorly run company meant
software always lagged behind sometimes by years. For example, it took some
time before folks could put video from their camera onto a dvd, and the cd's
themselves could only hold 120 pictures while SD cards were keeping thousands.
It was a software issue. In addition, some of the retail outfits they
contracted through seemed overpriced.

I think the official story was filled with lament over not taking digital
technology seriously early on. While I read some stuff about them, it has been
some years and I don't know how much was reserved for the workplace
environment.

------
guscost
Here's a memoir from Brad Paxton, a family friend. Might be worth checking out
(disclaimer: I'm related to the editor) since he was a VP who had a lot to do
with high-tech projects during this time:

[https://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Pop-Bottles-Pills-
Electronic...](https://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Pop-Bottles-Pills-
Electronics/dp/0991021606)

------
syats
Just thought it make the thread more interesting if I mentioned the fact that
Kodak used a non-standard calendar up until 1989.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar)

------
TheCondor
I hate these topics. After the fact it is always easy to make better choices
and every big company has made more than a few mistakes, some of which really
stand out in hindsight...

Kodak was a darling of the entire business world, for like a century. They
printed money, they provided great jobs to hundreds of thousands of people.
They were disruptive and put photography into everyone's hands. I think
companies have a fixed life and theirs came and went.

Trust me, if they had a big pivot that was blown off, it was in to industrial
chemicals or energy chemical manufacturing or something, it wasn't simply a
matter of repositioning as an imaging company from a film company.

Tell me, how should Pony Express have pivoted when the telegraph came on line?
Kodak, the brand and most of it was in a similar position.

------
bkyan
I was a summer intern working in OLED research at Kodak in the early 90's.
While not that many people associate Kodak with OLED, Kodak was considered one
of the world leaders in OLED research at that time. There is a short paragraph
about the folks I was working for, on the OLED page on Wikipedia (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED) ).
While Kodak was able to license the associated technology/patents, it didn't
seem like they came out with any consumer OLED products of their own in the
years that followed my short stay, there.

------
ernestbro
Thought experiment..even if you could time travel, how would you have saved
Kodak?

~~~
MarkMc
The answer is not to save Kodak, but rather sell the patents and chemicals
business, and wind down the photography business in a way that maximises
shareholder returns (ie. without ploughing capital into a low margin business
like digital cameras, or a business where they had no competitive advantage
such as ink jet printers).

Michael Dell received a lot of criticism for saying in the 90s that if he was
CEO of Apple he would wind down the company and return capital to
shareholders. But far too many CEOs are blind to this option.

------
shas3
Big ships are slow to turn. One systemic cause based on my experience in old-
big companies is that if profit margins on some products are high, mid and
some high level managers maximize that product (e.g. roll-to-roll manufactured
films in Kodak). With such optimization, you end up at "local-maxima". This
continues until you have an "iceberg right ahead" moment when profits start to
spiral downward. Depending on the pace of growth of the technology/sales of
your competitor(s), this descent is rapid and irreversible.

~~~
lawpoop
I understand that abstract idea in the big picture, but I am interested in the
specific history of how that played out at Kodak.

------
markbnj
We lived in upstate NY during the 1960's and I visited the Kodak campus in
Rochester, I think as a cub scout. It was an amazing place. I remember feeling
awe as we were walked through this long dark place where they proofed new
rolls of film. The memory of the feeling, at least, is still quite clear after
all these years. Great to read all the anecdotes about the company here.

------
drited
They didn't entirely have their heads in the sand. \--They invented the
world's first digital camera Source: [http://petapixel.com/2010/08/05/the-
worlds-first-digital-cam...](http://petapixel.com/2010/08/05/the-worlds-first-
digital-camera-by-kodak-and-steve-sasson/)

\-- They developed a massive patent portfolio including many digital
photography patents that had an estimated value of $1.8 to $4.5 billion at the
time of their Chapter 11 filing (read the article if you're interested for why
it got sold for far less - it's fascinating) Source:
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-
lowballing-o...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-lowballing-
of-kodaks-patent-portfolio)

------
power
It's tangential, but I'm reading Dracula atm and Jonathan Harker mentions
taking pictures with a Kodak. It was written in 1897.

------
nl
There are few insider details from a NYTimes profile on Steven Sasson[1] who
invented the digital camera while at Kodak.

[1] [http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/kodaks-first-
digita...](http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/kodaks-first-digital-
moment/?_r=0#)

~~~
ChuckMcM
This is the essence of that tale, and the quintessential definition of
"Enterprise Blindness."

 _“They were convinced that no one would ever want to look at their pictures
on a television set,” he said. “Print had been with us for over 100 years, no
one was complaining about prints, they were very inexpensive, and so why would
anyone want to look at their picture on a television set?”_

You are a hugely successful business, and all of your numbers are great, so
this indication that some time "far off" into the future you will have an
issue? Well you can worry about that when you get there. And senior management
will continue to manage "to the numbers." That means sales guys are making
their quota, margins are hitting their targets, Etc. And in Kodak's case, when
they lost a customer they had no visibility into it, that customer simply
stopped buying film and prints. They didn't buy them more cheaply from some
competitor (that would have shown up in their market surveys) instead they
just vanished.

What was more, their competitors were living off the amateur market. The
amateurs who wouldn't buy the professional grade film, and so their
competitors died or quietly exited the business while Kodak's core business
remained "strong". There was _no price pressure on film or processing._

As a result it was easy not to see the fundamental cancer growing in the
middle of the film business, and when demand for film started falling off a
cliff the company was already half dead. The "fix" would have been to reduce
the company size to a point where it didn't have the capacity to meet all of
the current film demand, because by the time the company had shrunk that far
demand would have shrunk to meet it.

This is all obvious looking backwards, and to some other peoples points the
executives all retired and got pensions and payouts. As an institution, the
company failed. There was no process for re-creating the company from the
ashes of the dying product line.

------
redtexture
The story of staggering institutional inertia and failure is amazingly similar
to Xerox's, and similar to hundreds of other US corporate manufacturing giants
declining into bankruptcy over the last 40 years, by failing to be concerned
with, or collectively act on (board, executive, staff) the future year risks
of on a several-decade time scale. This list of inertially failing
organizations, among others, includes General Motors, IBM, HP, AT&T, and
others.

[Can any public company plan on a multi-decade time scale? This is an
anthropological, sociological, cultural and business question of interest in
the academic literature.]

Others, along with Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen,
have written extensively on the general cultural difficulty of spending money
now for an uncertain future while making money presently on a multi-decade
investment.

Xerox was originally under the thumb of Kodak, in Rochester, New York, as the
maker of photographic paper, chemicals and related equipment, known as the _"
The Haloid Photographic Company"_ (halides -- bromine and related chemical
elements, along with silver, being the key photographic chemicals of
photography) and founded in 1906.

The owner-leadership of the Haloid company in the 1930s and 1940s knew the
company was doomed in the long-run with their then-present capability. Later
on, it turns out that neither the Xerox of 1995, nor the Kodak of 1995
understood the necessity of having a keen paranoia of their technology's
changing future and future unreliable income.

Xerox's, Kodak's, and other corporate stories are both studied in graduate-
level business and engineering programs looking at the risks of failing to
plan for change, the end of patent monopoly and market domination, and the
cultural and financial necessity for understanding, committing to, and
planning on the demise of the present technology currently sustaining an
organization.

The Haloid company was not crushed by Kodak, in part, because of antitrust
laws, but it was always in danger of failing in a competitive market dominated
by Kodak, and from the 1930s onward had committed money to find and own a
technology that was sustainable and patentable to survive: the Haloid company
invented the term "xerography" (dry image transfer).

After the growing success of xerography in the late 1950s, and 1960s, after
near-death experiences bringing the technology to market, the culture of
developing and ultimately surviving on the new market of new-but different
technology was lost in the profits of xerography in the minds of the then-
present executive leadership, addicted to the amazing profits of xerographic
patents: thus the results of new research and technology failed to be
supported to make it to market.

Yet the Xerox company's creations, developments and discoveries are the
present backbone of the present era of computing: ethernet, laser printers,
personal computers, graphical user interfaces, Smalltalk (see also Object
Oriented Programming and Virtual Machines, and the like). Look up the history
of Xerox's "Palo Also Research Center (PARC). The Smallalk VM was the
foundation of Self, and the later Java VM, with the addition of a couple
decades of further work.

See _" Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First
Personal Computer"_ by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander for that
story, published in 1988, nearly three decades ago. The cultural failures and
non-response parallels are remarkable.

Doubtless there are dozens of similar reports on the Kodak cultural inertia
and failure to understand change, in academic articles, and books. Google is
your friend.

Kodak leadership thought that they could not profit from digital cameras, and
early and expensive technology could only be used by large institutions
(NASA). As costs dropped, Kodak thought that their market was commodity
consumables, so they licensed the technology they created. The consumables
chemistry and photographic films and papers market ended with with the rise of
digital photography (no negatives), and digital, color ink-jet and xerographic
reproduction of images.

EDIT: _halide_ elemental chemical family

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Halide, not haloid.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_halide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_halide)

~~~
Turing_Machine
The chemical grouping is halide, yes, but the Xerox precursor company was
indeed called Haloid.

------
jwillis85
In some sort of alternate history. Setting Apple acquisition aside.. Kodak
would have acquired Kinkos and branched out into online ondemand photo
proofing for digital images. Then went totally Android and came out with
something more like an iPad than a phone, perhaps leaning in the direction of
GeoTagging and Environmental sensing. Phone tech might take a second seat to
messaging and something more akin to video calls on demand.

Yeah Shoulda Coulda Woulda, it just seems there were less barriers to
survivial and thriving than simply egos and business as usual attitudes.

------
rmason
What I've always been curious about was whether Apple's engineers reached out
to Kodak when designing the iphone's camera?

It would seem logical that Kodak could have potentially been a possible
supplier.

~~~
pavlov
Kodak? Around 2005 when the iPhone hardware spec was being designed? They had
completely lost the digital camera game by then.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I had a Kodak digital camera in 2003. It was no better or worse than competing
consumer digital cameras - i.e. it was a usable but mediocre affordable snap
cam.

I think where Kodak lost it was failing to bring high end technology into
compacts. Kodak had a big stake in professional digital cameras before 2000.
It's completely wrong to say they weren't in the market. In fact they almost
owned it. The first professional digital bodies were being sold by Kodak in
1991, and the former sensor division is still going under another name.

But they didn't seem to understand that the same technology was going to move
into affordable prosumer cameras, and eventually into consumer snap cameras.

They certainly didn't understand it was going to move into mobile phones,
where it would kill consumer film cameras. And they totally failed to
anticipate photosharing culture online.

To be fair, I think almost everyone underestimated mobile. I had a Nokia 9500
Communicator with a camera at around the same time I had the Kodak. The
quality was pretty bad, and there was nowhere near enough bandwidth to
consider photo sharing.

Now I have an iPhone with a camera which can give an old SLR a run for its
money, and photo sharing is no problem.

The difference is that Kodak were creating products - technological artefacts
for a single purpose.

Jobs and co were creating a _culture_ \- a set of experiences that include
hardware, software, marketing, and media attention.

Culture companies are much more likely to kill product companies in the same
niche than vice versa.

~~~
NzNz
> Now I have an iPhone with a camera which can give an old SLR a run for its
> money

Absolutely not. Older DSLR had lower resolution, but level of detail is not
all there is to image quality. Dynamic range, bokeh, control over perspective,
the ability to take pictures of moving targets at higher iso without the
picture becoming too grainy and the ergonomics are all things that even a 15
years old DSLR can do better than an iPhone 6s. You just can't get pictures
like these out of a smartphone :
[http://i.imgur.com/kV2CfBE.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/kV2CfBE.jpg)
[http://i.imgur.com/0jugE5B.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/0jugE5B.jpg)
[http://i.imgur.com/2bV1HJz.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/2bV1HJz.jpg)

These all come from a Nikon D1h, samples from dpreview. The D1h was released
in 2001. Nowadays, even the lowest end DSLR will outperform it in almost every
single way, apart from build quality. Even so, that old top end camera still
outperforms smartphones where it counts from the point of view of art
photography. In 2001, I still used film cameras because good DSLR like the D1h
were out of my reach, but these days, even a $300 DSLR will just obliterate
anything you could do with a smartphone.

And then there's the fact that most casual photography is taking pictures of
other humans, and that the wide angle lens of smartphones distort perspective
and make people weird up close. The iPhone has a 30mm equivalent which is very
unsuited to taking pictures of people. [http://fotografeando.me/wp-
content/uploads/2014/02/focal-len...](http://fotografeando.me/wp-
content/uploads/2014/02/focal-length-comparison.jpg)

[http://media-cache-
ec0.pinimg.com/736x/6a/10/3b/6a103beeaa37...](http://media-cache-
ec0.pinimg.com/736x/6a/10/3b/6a103beeaa377a2f7c0408a669b459e1.jpg)

You can see here how even the 35mm is plainly inadequate compared to the 50mm
focal length.

~~~
frankchn
I think TheOtherHobbes' statement about iPhones giving old SLRs a run for its
money is quite insightful -- not as a pure technical comparison, but more
about what consumers value from cameras.

The Nikon D1h, Canon 1D, etc... definitely has better bokeh, dynamic range,
perspective control, etc than even the best smartphone camera on the market
the today, but consumers just don't care that much about actual photographic
quality. They see a DSLR today and think "bulky", "another set of batteries I
need to charge", and "how do I share photos to Snapchat with that thing?"

Most smartphone cameras are more than good enough for daylight shots, selfies
or Instagram, and if you are not into photography, that's good enough.

------
tmaly
I was at RIT during the later half of the 90s. Most of my professors had done
work at Kodak, and the mantra was that if you had a job there, you were set
for life.

I think the digital camera and the market crashed from the dotcom bust worked
in tandem to take down Kodak.

They had some really smart people working there, and they invented some really
important tech that was used beyond cameras. Think image processing for
satellites etc.

------
cm2187
What I don't get is that my very first digital camera was a Kodak (must have
been in 2000). It wasn't very good (but no camera were then) but it was one of
the cheapest. So it's not like they were absent from the digital market. But
still somehow they missed the boat.

------
devin
I know of a story where a company selling software that banked on digital,
being told quite seriously by a member of the board that digital would never
be a thing. This was around 97-98.

------
estrabd
I heard a similar story about Polaroid having their own digital camera. Not
sure about the details.

------
DanBC
I'm also interested in the more specialist products - holography, xray, and
movie film.

~~~
jrockway
Xray film is just cheaper orthochromatic black & white film. Some large format
photographers like it because it's so cheap, despite being harder to use.
(Double-sided emulsion, so you can't manhandle either side of the sheet; very
contrasty, so development has to be carefully controlled; and generally a very
slow ISO, around 25.)

[http://matmarrash.com/blog/2012/8/28/working-with-large-
form...](http://matmarrash.com/blog/2012/8/28/working-with-large-format-x-ray-
filmcontinued)

I've experimented with similar film (Ilford Ortho Copy), but I generally
prefer the look of contrasty skies (filter out blue and green), which is the
opposite of what orthochromatic film will look like. (This is why older B&W
photos have stunningly-bright skies, contributing to the characteristic look
of photos from that era. Panchromatic film didn't exist, and the sky is very
bright relative to terrestrial objects when all you have is blue light.)

Generally the stuff gets the job done, though. Here's a test shot of Ilford
Ortho Copy:

[https://goo.gl/photos/qkretyMoozuNXczXA](https://goo.gl/photos/qkretyMoozuNXczXA)

Versus the same scene on Tri-X 320:

[https://goo.gl/photos/cwCn4c7XUzNM3xuh8](https://goo.gl/photos/cwCn4c7XUzNM3xuh8)

It was cloudy, so you don't really see the overexposed sky effect, but you can
see how the trees on the top right look darker. Presumably there was some
greenish moss on there or something.

