

The Demise of Kodak: Five Reasons - pbahra
http://blogs.wsj.com/source/2012/02/26/the-demise-of-kodak-five-reasons/

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psaintla
I'm not sure the author did their research, I actually worked for a startup
that was purchased by Kodak and eventually became one of the only divisions
that was profitable within the company. Kodak did invest in several startups
including ours and they did a miserable job of managing them, here is a quick
rundown of the issues we had after we were acquired.

1.) No one knew where the company was heading long term. It never seemed like
Antonio Perez had a real vision for the startups they purchased. All the
management in Rochester knew was that we generated revenue.

2.) Kodak middle management consistently threatened to offshore all of our
engineering team jobs when we had disagreements about our product direction.
This was how they thought they could control us and it failed miserably,
several engineers including myself left soon after we were purchased.

3.) They refused to pay high salaries for excellent developers. Hiring came to
a standstill because we couldn't find people to work for the measly 75K that
Kodak budgeted for engineering positions, our salaries were grandfathered in
but Kodak had hard salary tiers for new hires in certain positions that were
completely inflexible.

4.) Every job at Kodak was highly specialized to the point of ridiculous
redundancy and spectacular waste. If you were a Java engineer you weren't
allowed to write Python, that was the Python engineers job. If you were a
sysadmin, you couldn't write code at all, if you were a software engineer you
were never allowed to touch any part of the operating system. The team that we
had was highly experienced in both software engineering, system automation and
maintenance. When we were purchased we all became "Java Engineers" and were
never allowed to do anything other than write application layer code. If we
needed to add something as simple as a cron we put in a request to a ticketing
system and it took a bare minimum of 5 days for the request to be filled. We
ended up finding out that the Systems Administrators were actually sitting on
tickets so they could spread out their work and look busy and not get canned
which leads us to...

5.) Everyone in middle management or anyone who had been there for a long time
seemed to be trying to run out the clock so they could earn a pension. They
did everything from dragging their feet on tasks to actively thwarting other
divisions from being successful so they wouldn't look bad in comparison and
get canned.

6.) Incompetence at Kodak was pervasive. Kodak should be a case study in the
Peter Principle.

I could go on about this for a long time but you get the point.

