Betting on things that never change (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Betting on things that never change (2017)

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51 pointsmooreds36 comments

Or as Deming put it: long-term successful organisations need to find their constancy of purpose.

Kodak didn't find it: they were in the business of analogue film; they could have been in the business of capturing memories, and survived the digitalisation of photography.

Manufacturers of carburetors generally didn't find it; they were in the business of carburetors, and not stochiometric mixtures of air and fuel, and they didn't survive fuel injection.

The list could go on and on. Focus on "the job to be done", not the way you're currently doing the job. That lets you find constancy of purpose.

This is.. a weird spin. Kodak is a great long-term success story. Businesses aren't forever.

If Kodak was in the "business of capturing memories", what would they have done differently?

I knew someone who was working for a post-Kodak spinoff (Alaris). They tried just that-- to reframe themselves as a company that managed memories. It was an interesting concept, but I think they came in far too late in a crowded space.

https://www.kodakmoments.com/

If Kodak was in the "business of capturing memories", they wouldn't have dropped the technology for digital cameras. They wouldn't have been afraid of their own new tech (Kodak had digital camera technology in the early 70s) cannibalizing old tech (film), and instead invested in that segment.

They wasted something like 25 years dragging their heels because they didn't realize that people don't use film because film is somehow magic. They use it to capture memories. Kodak missed that boat, spectacularly, because they believed they were in the film business. Their answer to digital, for a long time, was "let's market film harder"

(Sidebar: For somebody from outside the US, 100 years is at best a mid-term success story. )

So they would have invested a lot in digital cameras, executed well(?) and gone bankrupt. Mobile phones ended up eating cameras for all but very niche uses.

The sensors in the mobile are still made by camera companies. It would have been easy for Kodak to dominate CMOS sensors.

So, at that point they'd be in the camera business, sort of. Right? Funnily enough the real long term, not changing thing is: people want to be able to 'capture' light....

They'd probably become a pretty big fab outside of just making smartphone sensors. The business of memory would abstract into the business of information in general.

ha true! "We are in the information business". If only they'd known.

You do realize that the long-term success of a company requires more than one decision, right?

SD cards are currently a $8bn market. Phone image sensors are a $15bn market. Digital camera market is $8bn (and growing, fwiw)

There's also the fact that memories need displaying. I hear OLEDs are popular these days. Kodak did groundbreaking research there too.

There were plenty of ways forward for Kodak that still would've fundamentally kept them in the "capturing images & memories" business without majorly contorting themselves. Instead, they were afraid of cannibalizing their own business. (Their really a canonical example in this area). It's Christensen's "Innovators dilemma".

Yes, the real story is more complex than that one decision, or even a handful decisions. There are other splendidly boneheaded decisions that have nothing todo with "capturing memories", but still a lot with "capturing images" - my favorite is that Kodak, shortly before the Boomer retirement wave, decided "eh, who needs medical imaging" and sold that unit off - but the motivation was the same. They didn't want to move from analog to digital.

And yes, getting these decisions alone wouldn't have been an automatic success - but it would have made further success possible. (One of the major things they would've needed to tackle is that analog is chemical engineers, and digital mostly isn't)

But with all these caveats, the root cause for Kodak's demise is still staying strong to a specific product instead of a bigger mission.

That was just one example of what the mission could have been. What should the mission have been?

My point is everyone can say they are betting on a non-changing thing and in retrospect it's easy to see what it could have been (in this case one of several, different ones). You've even expanded on "capturing memories" to make it "capturing images and memories" despite the fact they often have nothing to do with each other (medical imaging isn't related to memories, and diaries aren't related to images).

So what do they do? Go for the most abstract (read: big) mission possible? Why not "we are focused on making people happy". It doesn't change. People want and pay money for it.

Digital cameras were really only viable from ~2000-2010. Kodak might have been able to move those boundaries a bit, but you need mass adoption of fast enough computers and cheap enough flash, and the smartphones killed digital point-and-shoots by 2010.

Kodak actually tried hard to bank on digital and made great digital sensors, but the world went too fast with digital. Their projections were off by a number of years. They thought film was going to gradually decline, not drop off a cliff.

The first name in carbs for me has always been Holley. (I've got two cars with Holley 750 Double Pumpers.)

They not only not survived the EFI change, but even went public (via merger) this summer.

This is the premise of the book Start With Why

But people in Kodak got that, which is why they invented the digital camera. They didn't execute well. Transitions are tough.

Even if they executed well they would have been toast, it just would have taken another 10(?) years.

I'm posting this from an OS designed for cameras, which I think would have been terrible for cameras, but still ... at the very least, phones could hype their Kodak sensors instead of Sony sensors.

https://petapixel.com/2018/10/19/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm...

Meanwhile, Fujifilm thrived post-film by recognizing they're really in the chemical business, and pivoted well (to pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and highly functional materials).

Ironically Fuji expanded back to cameras and is also making some of the best digital cameras and lenses today.

> Or, “I love Amazon, I just wish you’d deliver a little slower.” Impossible.

Not entirely impossible ;-). Amazon now offers the option of having your orders bundled up and delivered on a set day each week to save on trips. However, in my experience, they are quite bad at it and subset of the items will arrive "too fast" a day early.

>Take three companies in the 1990s: Sears, Beenz, and Amazon.

>Sears bet the Internet changed nothing, to its detriment. Beenz bet the Internet changed everything – creating a points-based currency valid only at online merchants – to its detriment. Amazon bet the Internet changed distribution, but rooted its strategy in things that have never, and will never, change. It nailed the center of the Venn diagram of change on one side and timeless on the other. One drove competition, the other drove compounding. Every successful company does this.

So based on this metric, what would be the next sears. It's easy in hindsight to say what worked.

It's hard to make a perfect analogy, some potentials:

* Computer companies that bet Cloud changed nothing (HP, IBM) * Oil companies that bet solar/wind changed nothing (Chevron, Exxon) * Car companies that bet electric changed nothing (Fiat?)

Then there was Radio Shack who bet everybody would want to go around scanning bar codes to get to web pages.

It seemed incredibly dumb, and they're gone, but here we are with QR codes all over the place.

Slightly tangential, but I definitely would prefer Amazon to offer less choice. Sure, give me every book in existence, but don’t give me 1000 options for a new cable or whatever, most of which are of questionable quality and have dozens of fake reviews. I’d much prefer fewer, more reliable options.

But that wouldn't fit with the great one's narrative :)

Jokes aside (Bezos is obviously brilliant), you have a very valid point. There are all kinds of studies showing the problems with large selection, and many companies are betting on something that won't change - many customers want a narrow selection. Steve Jobs and Apple is a decent example. Tesla is another. Wide selection didn't seem to do much good for GM and Ford.

Seems like a nice sounding narrative that doesn't really hold water, at least from a practical perspective.

Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, AWS, Google Search and a lot of others - they were in fields changing all the time. Unless you define these very abstractly as "communication", "socializing", "entertainment", "compute infrastructure" and "finding things" and say "these things don't change in that they continue to happen" - in which case you can take virtually any product to the most abstract definition and say "it's not changing".

Well, you've done a nice job of restating the article, actually. It claims that all seemingly revolutionary businesses were not successful because of the things that change (like technology solutions e.g., "finding things", "communication", "compute infrastructure" etc) but on the same unchanging principles (e.g., business opportunities and strategies).

TFA / TL;DR:

    In the last 100 years we’ve gone from horses to jets and mailing letters to Skype. But every sustainable business is accompanied by one of a handful of timeless strategies:

    Lower prices.

    Faster solutions to problems.

    Greater control over your time.

    More choices.

    Added comfort.

    Entertainment/curiosity.

    Deeper human interactions.

    Greater transparency.

    Less collateral damage.

    Higher social status.

    Increased confidence/trust.

Then I've done a bad job communicating what I meant. My point is, (virtually) every single product can make the claim they are making a bet on something that doesn't change. Both good and bad products. Failed and successful.

The entire article says nothing of practical value. Everyone is betting on something that doesn't change and something which does.

It's not about products (business tactics). It's about business philosophy and business strategy.

And every business creating a new product or service can claim they are following this business philosophy and/or business strategy. They just have to talk at the right level of abstraction.

Very few of these things seem to have gotten better overall, so I’d say that most of these companies have failed, as has the overall strategy.

Not sure about this list. I thought apple succeeded, as Thom put it as solving problem of users even though user may not even aware of it. Kodak did not. I am afraid toyota against Glasgow (hydrogen …) as well.

Customer customer customer …

Hydrogen is going to displace batteries. The mistake is with companies who bet everything on li-ion batteries and not other ideas.

Yeah, Sears had a catalog business for like a century. Whatever went wrong a Sears, it wasn't that they had a corporate culture that taught them people only want to buy things at your physical store.

This is a great article.

However, Amazon stopped being the lowest cost retail Lee at least 3-4 years ago. I find that Target/Walmart consistently have lower prices than Amazon.

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