KODAK MOMENTS

[Alan Klein]

Kodak stuck its head in the sand because it had a huge industry in film to protect.  Although they discovered digital imaging and had all the patents, they really wished digital would just go away. 

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Ah, yes! You must be talking about Enron, Tesla, and the other current and recent rent-seekers...

Huh!?

[RSL]

Come on, Slobodan, you, of all people, must know what rent-seeking is. It's a standard term in economics. You can check it out here: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentSeeking.html

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

My "huh!?" was meant as "what that has to do with Enron, Tesla or what I was talking about?" Especially what I was talking about.

[Telecaster]

For me it was the Photo CD that was a real clue. Photo CD was a great invention, but Kodak presented it as a plaything to show arbitrarily clipped images on television.

For me, Photo CD was the entry to the digital revolution, but I had only a single one made, because I felt it was too limited. But, Photo CD made me go into scanning and image processing.

I was already scanning & processing when Photo CD came along, but for a brief time I hoped it would be a superior solution re. scanning. My first disc relieved me of that hope.     Kodak might've done very well in the electronic era if they'd taken the tech and its capabilities more seriously.

– – –

IMO trying to understand the genuine complexities of human decision making is more productive than political/dogmatic sloganeering. The folks at Kodak made many bad decisions. How and why? No ideological recitation is capable of answering these questions.

-Dave-

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... The folks at Kodak made many bad decisions. How and why?..

From my perspective (I spent about two years with them), several factors. One would be: being an old company, there was a lot of fossilized bureaucracy.  Then short-termism: obsession with quarterly results and "my" bonus - i.e., hasty decisions were made that look good in one quarter and got that manager a bonus for that quarter (or year-end), while consequences would be felt in the next period(s). By the time the mistake shows up, the manager might have been rotated through several other departments - there was an obsession with inter-departmental rotation, the consequence of which was that a lot of inexperienced and unqualified people got to manage things they did not fully understand. Again, being an old company, there was a lot of the "old boy club" mentality, "that's the way we do things at Kodak."

The thing that surprised me the most was that I was the only one among the management with a decent understanding of... wait... photography. Almost all others were typical salesmen and marketeers, whose knowledge of photography did not exceed the disposable cameras Kodak was peddling at the time. I am, of course, not talking about research and development departments. So, when I told my boss, a country manager (an American), back in 1999 that digital would take over in five years, he brushed it off as a distant future. Had he and others at his level (pretty high in Kodak's hierarchy)  had a bit more advanced understanding of photography, he would have seen the same thing I did. Then again, when you are obsessed with this quarter results only, you develop a myopic view of the future, and can't see even the next quarter, let alone the next five years.

[louoates]

My father was a foreman at Kodak's Chicago film processing lab for 40+years. During that time Kodak was way ahead in cutting edge technology. In the 1940s they developed "V" mail for the transmittal of WWII GI letters to and from Europe and the Pacific war zones. Due to its bulk, it was impossible to ship regular mail back and forth across the oceans without displacing war materiel. So Kodak shot copies of the letters onto 16 mm negative film, then flew the much more compact 16mm film reels to Kodak mini-labs where each letter was printed then delivered to the GIs by the military.
I believe by the 1950s the Kodak labs began to computerize their order processing, using giant tube-powered computers in special air conditioned rooms. These were mammoth punch-card-driven computers than kept track of thousands of orders per day from Walgreens and other retailers across the U.S. I think they were among the first companies to take advantage of computers for day-to-day operations.
As a budding amateur photographer in 1982 I was excited to be one of the first to buy the new Kodak Disk camera and one of the first to be massively disappointed with its poor quality. Although he never said so, I know my father was mortified with the results from that camera and never shot more than a few "disks" before going back to his 35mm. Many of Kodak's missteps began around that era. Others have recounted the history of mismanagement concerning  the digital technology that they squandered and the trends toward digital that they misread.
Kodak. RIP.

[martin archer-shee]

I think a lot of "big" companies have learned from their mistakes, sometimes too late however.

You can add SONY to the list. Think back to the BETA vs VHS time. Clearly, at the time, BETA was a far better system but SONY was too pigheaded to let others use BETA and the VHS camp did a much better marketing job and went to a number of makers. In the end SONY too had to sign on for VHS.

Martin