

Film-less Photography (first digital camera - 1975) - sep
http://pluggedin.kodak.com/post/?ID=687843

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todayiamme
I remember a talk I attended by Rodney Brooks roughly 4 years ago, in which he
used this example to show how exponential change catches up. He quoted a Kodak
executive who remarked that it was the future and they all knew it, but they
just let it slide after that. Why? As Mr. Graham's recent essay about Yahoo!
pointed out Kodak had a cash cow in the form of film and they didn't want to
see something as radically disruptive as a digital camera. Everyone knew about
it, but they didn't want to see it. I think that its quite an understandable
form of self deception.

So, what they did was they put it under a pillow and hoped that it would go
away. A smaller competitor on the other hand had nothing to lose discovered
the technology and along with others exponentially improved it (the megapixels
war) until the film was outdated at last. If you think about it if Kodak had
been willing to go out of their comfort zone they would have owned the camera
market today.

The most interesting thing is that if everything had been a constant then it
wouldn't have mattered. Self deception works really well in fields like
politics etc. but over here we had a phenomena that accelerated the change and
suddenly we had a positive feedback cycle to sustain it. This is why
technology is so interesting in my opinion. Opinions don't matter. If
something has technological merit then regardless of the fact of what you
think about it. It's going to improve and take over your constant.

What's troubling though is just how counter-intuitive it is and just how many
of us fall into the trap of thinking; 'nah it ain't gonna happen'.

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jacquesm
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxDfcyT92wQ&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxDfcyT92wQ&feature=related)

------
js4all
This has been on HN <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1611860>

