Yes, exactly. Toyota is refusing to take the L on this because Toyota is the market leader in gas-electric hybrids and Toyota is not the market leader in EVs. This is business strategy 101.
In fairness, they did catch up decades later...but that's likely at least a couple decades of revenue lost. And never really innovating.
If they'd have been more forward thinking, we'd likely see Kodak sensors in every phone today instead of Sony.
Sears, after dominating mail-order for a century, marketed Prodigy, a successful early dial-up network. But they were by that point heavily invested in malls, and were beat out as the 21st century's Sear's, Roebuck and Co. by a bookseller.
How a company that was focused on their legacy customer relationship system and logistics operations lost out to a company that was focused on building the future of customer relationships and logistics is a lot less difficult to understand.
I remember it differently. Also, actual history is different too.
> Bezos finally decided that his new business would sell books online, because of the large worldwide demand for literature, the low unit price for books, and the huge number of titles available in print.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Amazon#Online_books...
Selling books was never the ambition, it was only the path.
All they had to do was have the foresight to move that model onto the internet. They had the supply chain, warehousing, etc. They may have even been able to have done their own logistics, since every city had a Sears. Kinda how Walmart does deliveries now.
And as you mentioned...they got crushed by a bookseller :(.
Sears seems like it could have transitioned if it didn't have its head up its ass. The death of film means Kodak would have to constrict and double down on printing, and simultaneously expand their general chemistry efforts into new markets (which I believe they did but too little too late).
Amazon was the right size to grow with the market. Amazon didn't even start selling clothing until 2002.
Service Merchandise hit some weird bad luck in early franchising (and franchising may have been the wrong choice/it's own bad luck) and accidentally got somewhat region-locked into the US South East, but the business model was from today's perspective ahead of its time, directly addressed that "mall shopping need" while still keeping what made catalogs and drop shipping useful (and relatively efficient just-in-time logistics).
Any yes, people are all over it to the point that the most popular varieties can be difficult to find in stock, and prices have climbed significantly from a few years ago.
One good exampel is Apple. They were a computer company which was doing well again after the return of Jobs. Then came the iPod. And revenue exploded. But when the rumors of a phone appeared, a lot of people would comment: no, they won't do that as that would eat into their cash cow iPod. But we know how this ended. They released the iPhone, grew multiple times the size the company was and eventually even stopped making iPods.
Back to Kodak: they did invent the digital camera, but at a time it was way too early for being a product. But more importantly, they did bring some important digital cameras to the market in the late 90ies, the first usuable DSLR were Nikon/Canon cameras equipped with Kodak guts. They started the professional digital camera market. Without Kodak, it might have happened years later.
And at that moment, when the writing for film was clearly on the wall and they actually had managed to kick start its killer, they dropped the ball. Good management would have seen that they could "protect" film sales only on a per-quarter basis, but it was a dying business. They should have used the billions of cash they still had, to gain a solid foothold in the digital camera business, perhaps even outright bought Nikon, which was limping for a while.
Or invest strongly in all the adjacencies of digital imaging, which they did far too late.
I think you can find examples of failed pivots and successful pivots but I'm not sure that "big companies should stick with their current cash cow and never pivot" is a best practice.
There is nowhere near as much money to be made in the digital camera market. They failed to adapt, but at the same time, there was no saving what was an immensely large company even if they did adapt.
Film revenue for Kodak was $16 billions in 1996, adjusted for inflation that would be $30 billions, that number will make anything digital look like nothing (15 billions is the current revenue for the entirety of the digital sensor market in current dollars and Sony has 43% of that pie, a share that has been dropping as more competitors have entered the market and as Samsung kept improving.). You see a Sony sensor in many phones, but Sony doesn't make anywhere near film-era Kodak revenue on that side of their business. The higher end camera business is more profitable, but it doesn't sell much in volume, and the low end of the camera business has almost disappeared because of smartphones. (Canon, the biggest producer of digital cameras, has all but ceased making compact cameras apart from their G7X model. You can still find other models on the market but they're older unsold stock and refurbs. They also announced they would stop producing new DSLRs and will solely focus on making a narrow range of mirrorless cameras. To put it bluntly, the digital camera market is in a very unhealthy state. Don't solely look at price tags either, Leica for example makes some of the most expensive cameras on the market but.. their revenue is $400 millions, not even $1B)
For example, if Kodak had been first to digital, that doesn't mean they'd have had to give up any film at all. And since they were first, they could have set margins where they liked. Whether it would have survived and thrived...who knows. As others have pointed out, computers weren't commonplace back then.
Digital cameras did get commoditized, nearly 30 years after Kodak had invented it. So obviously, by today they'd had to have move on. High end sensors, glass, heck even cloud computing, something akin to Google Photos... there's no telling where they could have been if they'd have leaned in early.
That said, you point out the sensor market is 15 billion today... and Sony has about half. This is way, way more money than Kodak makes anymore. Today Kodak is at about a billion revenue per year.
Who wants to invest time & money into developing a mature, low-margin business?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterlyon/2021/06/29/at-last-to...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_C%2Bpod
But it is the first one where they're aiming for mass adoption.
It's not like they're not going in EV, they are just doing it at their pace (which is slow typical of Toyota).
Tesla already got the first mover advantage. Kia/Hyundai/Ford etc are fighting for second place. The gap between second and the rest won't be as large as Tesla vs second.
https://insideevs.com/news/601770/world-top-oem-ev-sales-202...
The same reason Apple went all in on the iPhone and dropped their lucrative iPod business. You drive your car on the road that takes you to the next level, not the familiar one that's heading off a cliff.