> Kodak famously invented the digital camera around 1975. But they failed to envision a future without film.
What would you have even put a photo onto to view it in 1975? A television I guess - at 320x240 NTSC resolution. Which is wildly inferior to an actual photograph in terms of quality at that time (35mm negatives are around 20 megapixels at 75 lp/mm).
How would you have distributed it? Photo CD? CDs weren't standardized for another 5 years. Laserdisc I guess? Not standard equipment for anyone at the time (even leaving aside that nobody had PCs either).
In 1975, the market for digital photography would have consisted of: satellite reconnaissance, military applications, and wire-service news photography. Military applications and wire-service being large fixed-installation cameras and not a SLR format.
Bear in mind, this is what a digital camera looked like in 1991, let alone in 1975: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS_100
Blasting Kodak for "not envisioning a future without film" in 1975 is like blasting IBM for not envisioning the personal computer in 1950. They were correct that the worldwide market for computers didn't exist at that time. And when the opportunity came to pivot - like the DCS-100 - they largely did. The military were early adopters of that for special operations teams for example.
What they didn't do was dive into consumer photography aggressively in the early 00s. And I'm sure that seemed like a reasonable business decision at the time: margins were much lower for consumer gear than professional, and kodak was not really a semiconductor firm.
Anyway, "kodak could have become kings of digital photography!" is one of those bits that has just sunk into the pop-culture psyche but isn't really true at all. Much like the IBM "there is only a worldwide market for five computers" line - they actually were right at the time they made that observation. The real problem was that when the time was right they were too blinded by their higher-margin businesses to pivot, but 1975 was not it.
The world was nowhere near ready for consumer digital photography in 1975 and it doesn't even pass the smell test that it might possibly have been. There's about another five technologies you really needed before digital photography could have become a thing commercially let alone viable for consumers.