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It is ironic since Kodak itself pioneered the first digital camera technologies. Often rare that the behemoth itself invents the disruptive technology but it certainly happens: For example, IBM, with the PC.

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I wonder if executive compensation schemes are at least partially to blame for failures like these? After all, next quarter's numbers will look a lot better if you stop spending money on R&D which, if it ever does pay off, won't for a few years down the road. So, if you're running Kodak in 1992 and you don't expect to be the CEO in 2002, why negatively affect your stock options by ensuring the company's future? Investors aren't given a breakdown of R&D spending by expected first payoff year, so no one can tell that your earnings look good because you've sold off the future.

I think the real problem may have been the margins they were making off film and film processing. a friend was wondering why neither canon nor nikon had any trouble making the shift, but afaik, they did not have big film or processing businesses to "protect".

Here's a link to the hilariously primitive looking 1.3 MP F3 based DCS100.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS_100

The box next to it is the unit that holds images, and a 5 MB SCSI disk. (About equivalent to a 1st gen iPod I guess)

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