And to add: I've often contemplated an alternative history where Kodak had the foresight to invest those hundreds of millions into digital photograph.
What many people didn't know is that it came with several SDKs. 1) It had a scripting language that ran on the camera, 2) Visual Basic 4 or 5, and 3) VBA for Office applications, so you could do something like automate employee ID badge creation.
Honestly, I don't know what they could have done to make up the loss of recurring consumable revenue in the digital world beyond what they already did with Kodak branded photo paper, Kodak branded memory cards, and Kodak branded accessories like lanyards and bags.
But what would Kodak really have brought to digital--especially at the scale to replace their consumables business? After all, Kodak once owned a full chemical company (that they spun off at some point) to provide them with their chemical needs. They didn't have much in the way of semiconductor expertise. Their network of dealers could have (and actually did) provide some ability for consumers to print digital photos early on. It's not like Kodak was making anything other than cameras like this when digital came in.
Fujifilm did better with the transition to digital by leveraging their emulsion and chemical expertise. But they still had a rough time of it and were a much smaller company.
Decision makers at kodak should have been able to leverage their considerable resources to gain market share with the new technology that would eventually replace their main product.
All things considered, they did a pretty good job of scaling down and staying alive. But it's a classic example of "My salary depends on not understanding it"
Someone uses precise complicated chemical manufacturing processes that require a deep understanding of color science to produce the millions of sensors in phones, cars, cameras, doorbells, etc. And it's not Kodak.
If you're going to do it, you want to be in the pro market, you want to be selling the body, you want an extensive first-party library and, ideally, minimal competition from external third-parties (Sigma, Tamron, etc) selling into your system.
Kodak had none of that, their only DSLR experience was building "digital conversions" of Nikon bodies (using nikon lenses) and they would have been starting from scratch.
Fuji also got really lucky that Japan fucking loves cameras, especially film cameras. Fuji has NEVER given a shit about the world outside japan, other than selling freighter-loads of color negative film (disposable cameras are still extremely popular in the developing world), they give zero shits about marketing their cameras or instant film or anything else outside the Japanese market. Their camera gear (35mm, MF, and LF) has always been top-notch and it just has zero market penetration in the US because they never bothered to market it. It's also routine to have fuji stuff (Astia, FP-100C45, FP-100C, etc) discontinued with like a week of notice to japan, and zero notice to the rest of the world, they have extremely poor organizational communication because they only give a shit about japan. But they never had to, because Japan has had a love affair with photography for 70 years now.
When you look at cameras like the Fuji X-series... those are cameras designed for the Japanese domestic market, cause they still love rangefinders. So is the Pentax Q series... americans don't get it, shitty p+s sensor, why would I buy it? you're not meant to, it's a cute little camera for japanese housewives, they just let us buy it too... sometimes.
Fuji (although later getting into the X series), did pretty much what Kodak eventually did--mostly applying emulsion and chemical expertise in addition to legacy pro film business plus commercial printing--but, as you say, much smaller and much more insular.
As I've written about in the past, Kodak gets held up as a classic example of "marketing myopia"--see any Marketing 101 textbook. But, for the reasons you cite, Kodak should just have pivoted harder into digital doesn't really hold up.
I used to be an IT industry analyst and, while they were never a particular focus, I did follow what NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi did in the server market. My general observation was that they all had aspirations to be global IT suppliers but, for the most part, they didn't want to make any material investments to make that actually happen.
https://i.ibb.co/bPPgvBN/Photo-37-of-100.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/G5r08cY/Photo-50-of-100.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/X2nPJgT/Photo-74-of-100.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/n1pTKC8/Photo-92-of-100.jpg
Probably shot on Kodak Gold 100 color negative with a Nikon FE2. Gosh I suddenly miss the smell of film.
I have suffered through more than my fair share of those.
> I think there was a certain baked-in assumption by Kodak and others that the digitization of photography would still look a lot like how photographs were taken and shared in the film world.
I don't have any hard numbers, but at my dad's shop we probably sold and developed 95%+ negatives vs slides. We did so little E6 (much less Kodachrome) that we didn't even bother with it in-house. Most photos were shot on negative and shared as prints, not shot on slide and shared as slide shows. So if PhotoCD was supposed to take the place of a slide projector, it was already a losing proposition.
To this day, I have my favorite digital photos printed, as do my family members. There's something more intimate about passing around a photo album than sitting in front of a display.
I think PhotoCD was one of those things that was too early since there wasn't demand for sharing digitally yet, and then too late once digital cameras came out and made digitizing film unnecessary.
I actually wrote an article for CNET when Kodachrome processing was eventually shut down. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/countdown-to-kodachr...
At the time, usable digital cameras looked like the Kodak F3 back plus shoulder-mounted hard drive in this article: https://www.businessinsider.com/digital-photography-revoluti...
Didn't they hold some early key patents?
Probably. They invented the digital camera for the KEYHOLE/KENNEN/CRYSTAL satellite series in the 70s, there’s undoubtedly some patents that came with it.
But, what would you have even done with a digital image in 1975? Showed it around the family Christmas party on your laptop? About 20 years too early for that.
Even in 1991 when they got serious about professional digital imaging, a DSLR came with a little suitcase attached with electronics and storage and batteries. Even in the professional market there was no interest in a shitty 1.3 megapixel image when a film camera was shooting the equivalent of a 30-40 megapixel image (using optical enlargement not scanning), nobody would want to take that kind of hit unless you needed images right now, ie news crews and military. They sold less than 1k units, at a cost of $20k per unit (in 1991 dollars!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS_100
By the time the market was ready for consumer digital cameras, in the late 90s/early 2000s, they did indeed explore that market (eg DC 210 point-and-shoot), and it was already a low-margin market and becoming lower all the time. That market instantly became a race to the bottom and by about 2004 it was already completely commoditized. I remember the Canon A40 being hot shit for a point and shoot, a couple gens later and it was just the same design rehashed over and over again, undoubtedly with margins getting thinner every time around. Look at the full Canon model list and you can see by the time the A410 comes out (around 2004-2005) the models stop because the market is just dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DC_Series
https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DC210/DC210Acgi.HTM
https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DC240/DC240A.HTM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_PowerShot_A#Models
https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/A40/A40A.HTM
“Kodak should have done more with digital!” is a super easy thing to say, but, what specifically should they have done that they didn’t already do, and when should they have done it?
It does seem like they could have done more, or marketed better, or something, but it’s not as obvious as people think it is. It might be instructive to look at the efforts of Nikon or Minolta (eg the RD-175) by comparison and nobody else was doing significantly better than that. That was 1995, four years after Kodak went to market with their first commercial DSLR for the pro market, and four years before Kodak got serious about consumer cameras.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minolta_RD-175
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_E_series
The only real answer I can think of is that they should have gone harder in this market - the pro market where the margins were better. But Kodak was never Nikon, they had some high-end models in the 40s and 50s (Kodak Medalist, Retina series, Ektra series, and their pro MF/LF lens line) but they pretty much exited the pro market by the mid 50s, and that was before SLRs really took off. They were a consumer company and didn't have the SLR experience that, say, Nikon and Canon did to make that pivot. They didn't have the pro user-base with tons of lenses to lock users into the system, they didn't have the service network (not film but pro-tier camera/lens service), etc. Nobody in the pro market thought "kodak" at all, let alone in the SLRs, all of their prior stuff was Kodak electronics grafted to Nikon bodies, they had zero experience at building the SLR body itself, zero lens library (again the nikon bodies used Nikon lenses), etc. They would have been starting from scratch the same as any other chemical company that wanted to start building cameras.
It’s an extremely unsatisfying answer but generally the market operated efficiently here and other companies that were better suited to doing digital won the race. Kodak had no particular electronics or semiconductor expertise, they were a chemical company and a (low-end consumer junk[0]) camera company, not software or electronics. They didn’t pivot (because it didn’t make sense to pivot to a low margin market like that) and then died. It sucks and maybe they could have leveraged their brand and network better... but what specifically?
[0]: and I'm not throwing shade about it, the best camera is the one you have at hand and can afford to shoot, but, nobody is reminiscing fondly about the image quality of the Kodak Pony 135 or the Instamatic, either... Kodak's model was to get the camera into people's hands and get them shooting and sell them the film, and the cameras were junk starting from about 1960 onwards. Cheap vacuum-formed plastic or bakelite, and maybe a glass doublet for the lens, otherwise plastic doublet. 90% of everything is crap and kodak's cameras post-1960 fall into that bucket, they are NOT the ones that are going up in value again these days lol.
https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Kodak_Pony_828/135#Pony_...
And once you take away the film business, and the photo paper business (for optical prints, eg RA-4 process)... there's nothing left of Kodak. They never made SLRs, just digital conversions for Nikon's bodies. How do you pivot from that?
Mostly joking, but it does suggest a pretty isolated internal company culture... they planned projects and billed based on different months than the entire rest of the world. Wild.