Pages: [1] 2   Go Down

Author Topic: The first digital camera  (Read 20241 times)

tom b

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1471
    • http://tombrown.id.au
The first digital camera
« on: August 16, 2015, 04:08:40 pm »

In 1975, this Kodak employee invented the digital camera. His bosses made him hide it.

An interesting article.

Cheers,
Logged
Tom Brown

RSL

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 16046
    • http://www.russ-lewis.com
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #1 on: August 16, 2015, 05:22:54 pm »

And they continued in this vein until their world came crashing down around them.

The Kodak story is a pathetic tale of catastrophic stupidity by people running a company loaded with geniuses.
Logged
Russ Lewis  www.russ-lewis.com.

Eric Myrvaagnes

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 22814
  • http://myrvaagnes.com
    • http://myrvaagnes.com
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #2 on: August 16, 2015, 05:29:58 pm »

And they continued in this vein until their world came crashing down around them.

The Kodak story is a pathetic tale of catastrophic stupidity by people running a company loaded with geniuses.
Well said.

Thanks for posting this, Tom.
Logged
-Eric Myrvaagnes (visit my website: http://myrvaagnes.com)

BJL

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 6600
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #3 on: August 16, 2015, 06:51:39 pm »

And they continued in this vein until their world came crashing down around them.
Not really: Kodak developed a lot of important digital imaging technology, produced the first digital SLRs (based on Nikon and Canon bodies) and was a major force in designing and producing CCDs for digital cameras and at one stage for almost all digital media format backs..  Something eventually went very wrong though!
Logged

Slobodan Blagojevic

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 18090
  • When everyone thinks the same, nobody thinks
    • My website
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #4 on: August 16, 2015, 06:59:37 pm »

Kodak's quandary was "simple:" how to commit suicide and stay alive ;)

amolitor

  • Guest
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #5 on: August 16, 2015, 06:59:48 pm »

It is certainly received wisdom that Kodak fumbled it.

It's not obvious that it's actually *true*, though. Had Kodak survived and prospered in the digital age, there is no doubt they'd be writing books about the most Epic Pivot ever. And please don't cite Fuji as an example. Fuji's position was quite different in a number of important ways, starting with being #2 and not #1.

Survival was never going to be easy for Kodak, and it's possible that there was no strategy for success. There is no law that says every company has a path to prosperity if only management is clever enough.

Logged

Eric Myrvaagnes

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 22814
  • http://myrvaagnes.com
    • http://myrvaagnes.com
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #6 on: August 16, 2015, 07:56:05 pm »

Kodak's quandary was "simple:" how to commit suicide and stay alive ;)
!!!!    :D
Logged
-Eric Myrvaagnes (visit my website: http://myrvaagnes.com)

RSL

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 16046
    • http://www.russ-lewis.com
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #7 on: August 17, 2015, 02:09:02 pm »

I'm gonna cite Fuji. When I was in Korea in 1953 we sometimes couldn't get Kodak color film, but we always could get Fujifilm. Compared with Kodak's stuff it was crap. It got a lot better in later years, and Fuji's management took full advantage of that.

I'll say there was no strategy for success at Kodak. The folks in the front office were convinced they'd be able to coast along on film sales forever. In the meantime, in the back room, they had some brilliant guys designing things like sensor arrays. Management doesn't have to be clever, but they do have to be awake. In Kodak's case, they weren't.
Logged
Russ Lewis  www.russ-lewis.com.

Telecaster

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 3686
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #8 on: August 17, 2015, 02:18:02 pm »

I think what did Kodak in was its inability, or unwillingness, to accept the degree of scaling back and refocusing it would've had to do to remain viable. IOW…what Slobodan says.

I was briefly part of a company, back in the Aughts, in a somewhat similar position. What needed to be done to stay healthy & alive in the longer term was clear enough. How to overcome inertial forces and vested interests was quite another thing. The company went out of business with senior & mid-level management knowing precisely how & why they were blowing it and yet still incapable of acting.

-Dave-
Logged

hjulenissen

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2051
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #9 on: August 18, 2015, 02:28:47 am »

So what do you do when you are selling loads of film and earning loads of money, but the future is (probably) in digital? Do you contribute to the technology shift (one where you loose some or all of your natural strengths vs competitors), or do you try to keep the old cash generator alive for as long as possible?

I am sure that manufacturers of horse wagons faced something similar 115 years ago. Along comes "disruptive technology" and big organizations have a hard time adjusting to that.

-h
Logged

bassman51

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 142
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #10 on: August 19, 2015, 09:26:18 pm »

Kodak was not the first, and will not be the last, company to fail because it was unable to adapt to massive disruption.  This book explains it brilliantly:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business/dp/0062060244

In my view, the ultimate problem is that there is no known strategy to incent management to take extremely long-term views in companies that are currently at the top of their field, but may face massive disruption to their business model in the medium term.  They get rewarded hansomly for improving profits this year and next year, and punished if they make a risky investment which will decrease profits, accelerate the demise of their current business and may not pay off for them. 

In fact, the number of companies that have survived such disruptions is small, with IBM being the only large one that I can think of off hand.  But there may be others. 
Logged
Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

RSL

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 16046
    • http://www.russ-lewis.com
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #11 on: August 19, 2015, 09:39:37 pm »

And yet IBM gave up on the microcomputer, which turned out to be the overall winner in the whole field.
Logged
Russ Lewis  www.russ-lewis.com.

spidermike

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 535
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #12 on: August 20, 2015, 04:21:28 am »

In my view, the ultimate problem is that there is no known strategy to incent management to take extremely long-term views

I think it is a different issue, not one of incentive but one of seeing new possibilities. If a company put money into every new idea on the hope it would succeed they would quickly go bust no matter how enthusiastic the developer was in their 'vision for the future'.
When you have a massive shift in technology it is not always obvious what the impact will be and the company has to take a calculated gamble as to where to put their money. And when you have a 'first in class' product your current business model will impact what you will follow up on. The business world is packed with products that were hailed as the next great thing and did not succeed, and we only see the ones that did.
To take Russ's comments on the IBM the problem was not a lack of willingness to plan long-term but their business model was based on big mainframes (it still is) so the idea of a small independent computer was not really in their mainstream thinking. Which is why when Bill Gates had his vision for a compute in every home a lot of people, IBM (and a lot of 'experts' outside IBM) patted him on the head and agreed to what seems now to be a crazy licensing deal. Rather like the Beatles and the views that guitar based bands were out of favour and would not succeed.
Logged

amolitor

  • Guest
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #13 on: August 20, 2015, 09:38:47 am »

IBM has realized that mainframes will always be around because they're a good idea. The key is to stay out in front of the naming. This year, for instance, mainframes are called The Cloud.
Logged

RSL

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 16046
    • http://www.russ-lewis.com
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #14 on: August 20, 2015, 11:16:49 am »

Right, Andrew.

I think I already told this story, but I'll tell it again: When IBM wanted to buy DOS, which Microsoft actually had gotten from Tim Paterson, Bill Gates and Paul Allen went to a meeting with Microsoft's top people to negotiate the sale. Both Gates and Allen were wearing ill-fitting suits, and Allen had a habit of rocking from side to side when he was thinking while Gates had a similar habit except he rocked forward and back. The two of them sat there rocking while the well dressed negotiators looked down on them and negotiations went forward. IBM bought DOS and called it PC-DOS, but Gates talked IBM into allowing Microsoft to sell a parallel version called MS-DOS. As a result of that deal, a few years later Microsoft could have bought IBM with a leveraged buyout.
Logged
Russ Lewis  www.russ-lewis.com.

Telecaster

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 3686
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #15 on: August 20, 2015, 11:03:09 pm »

MS-DOS (along with PC-DOS) was mostly a clone of the earlier CP/M operating system. The Microsoft/IBM variant used a different file system…internally meaningful but not externally to end users. The first computer my friend Dale & I built, in 1979, used CP/M as its OS.

Earlier, in mid/late 1978, another friend & I met Paul Allen & Bill Gates at a homebrew computer trade show. Probably one of the first large-scale shows of its kind. They were selling copies of Microsoft Basic, for CP/M, on floppy discs in ziplock bags. We chatted briefly with them and moved on. I had my Leica M2 and 35mm Summicron with me, but didn't take any pics of the Microsoft booth as (I thought) they had nothing worth documenting.  :D  :o

-Dave-
Logged

Justinr

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1733
    • Ink+images
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #16 on: August 26, 2015, 05:12:25 pm »

But but but......

 the KH-11 was the first American spy satellite to use electro-optical digital imaging, and create a real-time optical observation capability.

which was launched in 1976, a year after Kodak invented the digital camera and then did nothing with it. So who got there first, Kodak or the US military?

I know which my money is on.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennan
Logged

Gulag

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 336
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #17 on: August 27, 2015, 03:34:35 pm »

And they continued in this vein until their world came crashing down around them.

The Kodak story is a pathetic tale of catastrophic stupidity by people running a company loaded with geniuses.

I don't think they were stupid. Kodak behaved practically in a very rational way to maximize it near monopolistic present profit at the time when digital camera came to the scene. In retrospect, its perfect instrumental rationality eventually caused its demise.
Logged
"Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images."

— Jean Baudrillard

RSL

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 16046
    • http://www.russ-lewis.com
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #18 on: August 27, 2015, 04:15:35 pm »

I guess your definition of "stupid" differs from mine. To me, the inability of management to deal with obvious future trends is stupid.
Logged
Russ Lewis  www.russ-lewis.com.

Gulag

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 336
Re: The first digital camera
« Reply #19 on: August 27, 2015, 04:25:47 pm »

I guess your definition of "stupid" differs from mine. To me, the inability of management to deal with obvious future trends is stupid.

One of my favorite quotes is "The Future is Stupid."   Marcuse famously argued more than half a century ago that the enlightenment project aka modernity's instrumental rationality results in systemic irrationality and catastrophe for entire humanity.

Logged
"Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images."

— Jean Baudrillard
Pages: [1] 2   Go Up