Lloyd Rempel Photography

I bought a Kodak digital camera for myself, and each of my children, and a Kodak computer printer. I really gave the company a shot. The products were great, except they failed repeately.

Kodak generously replaced them, and their parts, over and over. Often sending me a new model for free because the old one no longer existed. Not good for margins, or customer satisfaction.

It is hardly the only example. I owned three Dell PCs, because I was pleased with the first two, before two hard drive failures and a motherboard failure in a few years on the last one. So I switched to an Imac.

Somehow I think some of the success of failure of these companies depends on what goes on in China, or wherever it is that they actually make the stuff. Outsourcers beware.

I was referring to a camera, like the one you use for Skyping today.

The first camera built at Bell Labs by Mike Thomsett was a prototype of a video camera (which is a real camera, even without storage) that was later developed into a product, “Picturephone”. Picturephone was demonstrated for the public, but performance, given the small bandwidth available at the time, was mediocre and it never was brought to the marketplace.

That camera was demonstrated before Sasson built is “still” camera.

No dispute over the invention of the CCD, which is what is discussed in each article you link. The Kodak camera in 1975 relied on CCDs, of course. Mr Sasson’s camera is widely acknowledged to be the first complete prototype, including the necessary storage component, and it received a patent (not challenged, to my knowledge). The invention of the CCD was a remarkable achievement, but distinct from the integration of that into a fully functional and later commercially produced item.

Albeit not a movie camera, I had an Olympus digital camera in 1997. I remember being surprised that Kodak was still flogging their film, saying that digital would never be a competitor for film cameras.

We used to call it MCM: Monroe County Myopia.

I had considerable interaction with Kodak in the early days of digital photography. They (nor I) never envisioned the rapidity with which digital photography replaced film. There were clearly people withing the organization committed to the development of a digital camera business, but with a limited scope. Their biggest barrier in my mind were the huge factories devoted to manufacturing acres of film and paper, all with high margins. The could not see how a digital camera business could fit into that business model. Selling printers, paper and ink? The accountants looked at the opportunity and likely saw a bleak picture – and they were right.

Kodak’s time had come to an end.

Rob S, I worked at Taylor in the ’80s. Several of us bailed out when it’s management got strange. One of my close friends went to Kodak. I don’t have the heart to ask him if he will be getting retirement pay after the bankruptcy.

As Warren Buffett says, buy stock in a company that is simple enough to be run by idiots — because sooner or later it will be.

Kodak’s top management was very strange in those days. Unstable fellows from what I hear. And more MCM.

Oh man, at least yours had a hard drive! My first digital camera (about the same time but I forget the model) had a floppy drive. I still remember taking pics of Mayan ruins and uploading them to my first website — I think Geocities. Hideous creatures, both.

shibakoen, I had a 4 or 8 MB card. Back then I had to have lots of those memory cards because I could only get a few pictures on a card.

When bigger cards came out the Olympus couldn’t handle them! Now I can take thousands of shots per card and at a tiny price per card. Yeah!

So where did Kodak go wrong? This would be a really interesting case study. It sounds similar to the Xerox PARC story with the Alto, essentially a modern office PC with mouse, windows, Ethernet and email, developed in 1973.

The piece does a good job highlighting most of the issues but, of course, can’t provide sufficient context. Fuji was much better located for developing films for LCD’s and the like than Kodak. Fuji was able to see Kodak’s failures – first mover disadvantage? – and do differently. Etc. If you think about their picture sharing and the like, they were unlucky enough to be not only ahead of the curve but to be a technology company playing in what has become a services company business. In saying that, I mean a company like Facebook or Google or MySpace or back to names like Tripod has no physical product.

Kodak also paid a price for its strong brand name; no one, including me, ever thought of Kodak cameras other than as Brownies. The ultra-recognizable brand was a liability competing in a market with companies known for cameras. I thought then that Kodak should have created a new brand or bought some name because Kodak stood for film, not digital cameras. This point was, to me, huge at the time.

Paul, I liken companies to waves coming ashore. They grow and grow, then break and crash up onto the beach.

Friends have a full newspaper page framed on their kitchen wall. Classified ads from 1900 or so. Not one of the companies existed when I saw the page – and that was in 1966.

Less foresight than a long history of a company that really valued innovation. That came from George Eastman himself. He not only invented flexible film but pursued people for Kodak that pushed the boundaries of film and film processing. I’m not sure of the truth of this but one story is he built the Eastman Theatre, which is a remarkable place, to lure 2 French scientists. This focus on innovation spread to other optics-related companies so Rochester, NY became a cluster of imaging invention, notably Xerox and Bausch & Lomb.

(True story or not, Eastman is arguably the best undergrad/graduate conservatory in the world and University of Rochester, which he also founded – the two are not separate – is a major research university. And it’s a world leader in, of course, optics and lasers.)

Companies sometimes retain traits of their founders. Kodak did. Ford has remained a leader in assembly production; it was for many years the only American car maker that could build cars about as quickly as Toyota. Where Ford fell down was a very long product cycle, which may also be traced back to the founder and his reluctance to introduce new models.

George Eastman deserves these compliments and more. He was one of three annonymous donors in 1912 who funded the main academic campus for MIT. This saved this great research institution. It was only disclosed recently.