When Kodak and Polaroid went to war | Hacker News Reader

When Kodak and Polaroid went to war

steveblank.com

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Incredibly well researched and annotated. A tidbit that struck me was that not only did Kodak produce the first digital camera in 1975¹, they had a product in the form of a digital spy satellite in 1976.

1: https://petapixel.com/2010/08/05/the-worlds-first-digital-ca...

Kodak's failure to respond to the threat of digital photography has always been a classic example of an innovators dilemma fail... but after reading this I realize it was far worse than I thought.

Having been given 30-40 years of financial data on the effect of digital photography squeezing them out of one lucrative sector they wasted all that unique foreknowledge on ignoring digital photography in the consumer space as well.

It's not that they didn't respond. They had loads of digital printers, cameras, digital picture frames, photo papers. They even had fairly innovative stuff, the Kodak Easyshare Frame's fetched a good price for a while. The first frames that you could email a picture too. They even innovated on SmartTV boxes, one of the first items you could watch Youtube on your TV with the "Kodak Home Theatre HD Player"

It's not at all the same as like sears failing to migrate to online shopping. Kodak was in a situation where there industry just pretty much died. The only real way they could have pivoted would have basically been to become Apple and invent the Iphone first.

Instead they transitioned to outsourced IT management or something to that effect I think?

And in addition, the Kodak DCS was the first digital SLR. (Basically a Nikon with a digital sensor strapped on). But, it was insanely expensive, adopted for limited applications.

It is true that Kodak lost an opportunity to be a 'first mover' in consumer digital cameras. Would it have made much difference in the long run? probably not.

Kodak was probably a chemical company first with a depth of chemical knowledge (a bulk of the development of photography was the design of film chemicals).

Fujifilm, Kodak’s later main competitor, was in the same boat and they just leaned into chemicals more.

Fujifilm survived and then went back to photography and now makes instant photography film again. They also make digital cameras that have a decent following.

Kodak could have probably done the same. They were probably right to to not invest in digital, but they were probably wrong to not invest in chemicals, their actual main strength.

But they did invest in digitals, heavily. There just wasn't enough there to power the huge ship that had been driven by film. Even if they controlled the entire digitals market it wouldn't compare to the previous film market. Perhaps chemicals could have been a saving grace, but I believe Fujifilm had a sufficiently cushioned blow due to the Xerox subsidiary and the more favorable Japanese Business environment. In contrast to Kodak, Fujifilm didn't suffer a significant reduction in government revenue.

I think the big problem was that digital technology just wasn’t good yet to bother making a digital camera. It’s not just the sensor… it’s also storage and processing and it took a few decades before digital cameras were good.

Investing in digital cameras was going to require many years of R&D with little payback. Someone like Sony could do it because they have all these other business sectors to subsidize development.

If Kodak couldn’t go into the chemical business, I’m not sure what else they could have done then.

They also had a nuclear reactor in a basement. I have no idea when that was commissioned or what research they were doing with it

https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/local/2016/08/18/...

Fujifilm was also just a much smaller company. Which isn’t necessarily an advantage but probably was in this case—and Fujifilm went through some tough times too.

Kodak did invest heavily into chemicals, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Chemical_Company

As that article states, they spun it off as a separate company in 1994, before digital photography hit.

Kodak management's mistake was laser-focusing on consumer imaging, and spinning off all of its other businesses like chemical, medical, office systems, etc. Consumer imaging was the one thing that dropped to zero in value as it became a commodity, and Fujifilm survived through those other businesses.

> Fujifilm survived and then went back to photography and now makes instant photography film again

It's actually funny how Fujifilm's single largest generator of revenue is again analog film

All of their products were a little too cheaply designed and made though. They drug their feet getting into the digital camera game and when they finally did, they released cameras that looked like toys compared to the other companies' offerings.

I think you're referring to a later period. They had earlier digital cameras that were not cheap and were ahead of the competition. IIRC Kodak invented the digital camera pretty much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS

Sure, but those weren't really mass marketed. You don't make money by making one off devices that aren't sold to the general public. The few things that they did market were too expensive and not readily available. Hell most of the links in that wiki are red because none of the individual models were interesting enough to even have their own entries. They started the race and then dropped out instead of investing in long term survival of their company.

I used a Kodak digital camera in the late 90's. I don't remember the model name. These cameras were not "one offs". They were not quite consumer products either. They were more "Pro-sumer".

Even later they had some pretty good models but were just a touch too late into the consumer market vs. others like Sony, Fuji and Canon when the market exploded. I'm not really sure anyone made a lot of money in this market.

There is a profitable business in supplying camera sensors, lenses, and other parts to phone manufacturers. You don't have to invent the entire device.

There is, now. Also the margins are thin and the competition is fierce.

Before their downfall, Sears had a better website than Amazon for buying hard goods.

When Amazon was still focused on selling books, Sears had a huge array of non-book stuff that could be bought and shipped to their store for free, or delivered anywhere at a fairly low cost. I bought all kinds of stuff that way, at a time when buying anything online still seemed kind of novel.

For a very long time the Sears Parts website was the foremost place to find appliance parts and documentation online.

Sears was even one of the founders of Prodigy, years before Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the Word Wide Web.

FFS, they had a rich history of taking orders and delivering products that started over a century ago.

So, one might ask: If the old trope of "they didn't understand teh Intarwebs, herp herp" is false, then what was it that brought ruin to Sears a little bit quicker than some of their fellow mall anchor peers?

And that answer is simple: Standard corporate raider tactics.

https://janweirlaw.medium.com/how-hedge-funds-profit-from-ba...

I think the issue with Sears is they had a ton of large brick-mortar-stores (often the "anchors" at malls, which is another nearly dead industry with the last indoor mall built in the US in 2006). Remember the fear of Wal-Mart killing main street in the late 90s into the 2000s? Wal-Mart came in and killed the competition, which included Sears. Then Amazaon annihilated Sears further and took a huge dent in Wal-Mart. Sears had no choice but to implode. I imagine major horse and carriage companies suffered a similar fate with the invention of the automobile.

You’d might think that — seems obvious, right? — but you’d be wrong! Private equity killed Sears.

https://prospect.org/economy/sears-gutted-ceo/ https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/16/investing/retail-sears-privat...

Eddie Lampert killed Sears, plain and simple: https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bsxn8l0u5yr6z...

> dead industry with the last indoor mall built in the US in 2006

Well that's straight up false.

The American Dream mall in East Rutherford, NJ opened in 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream_Meadowlands

Likewise with Blockbuster. They started a DVD mail-order service and streaming service to compete with Netflix, but it was too little too late.

Kodak had a massive investment in analogue photography and failed to see the future in a non-binary way where both film and digital photography could coexist. Film photography is making a modest comeback, but there are no new cameras being made apart from Leica M6 and the upcoming half-frame Pentax compact film camera.

They did respond. EasyShare was the number one consumer camera system before the novelty of docking stations wore off. Their problem is they never cultivated a reputation as a quality camera manufacturer and were dead once Nikon was ready to go digital on its own. With no professional grade product line they had nothing to create the impression of a superior brand image.

Toyota ignoring electric cars will be looked back on the same way

Big doubt, they have obviously been right to focus on hybrids for the current market. What makes you think they will not be able to compete on whatever the next pure EV cars look like?

I just bought a car. Avoided electric. Too expensive for what it is just now.

Car would have cost twice as much and that allows me to easily buy 10 years of fuel and running costs let alone accounting for depreciation. Charging standards and user experience needs to be better still.

Hoping in 5 years or so when my other car is ready to be replaced that the decision goes the other way, but we'll see. For now it's a no go.

I expect that Toyota will have products ready when the time is right.

Innovators dilemma? Or what happens when well established publicly traded companies become legally beholden to quarterly results and shareholders' / investors' expectations?

The financial system and the economic system encourages rolling the dice on (e.g) Tesla, but not doing the same on (e.g.) Ford. Furthermore, the downside of tying (executive) compensation to results is it "inspires" short term thinking, short term vision and new Coke results.

Sure there are a handful of exceptions and outliers (e.g., Apple) but isn't there always? Is it really a dilemma when the system is strongly wired to keep you on a narrow path?

It's like growing a child. When you see someone's kid as a stranger it's obvious "what's wrong with it". Now fully immersed in the Kodak's diversified enterprise ecosystem, why exactly should you focus on consumer digital cameras?

When I was a kid my parents had one of the Kodak instant cameras. I remember when Polaroid sued them out of existence and as part of a class action lawsuit my parents got a settlement. It was some coupons for Kodak brand batteries and one specific model of film camera we could never find in stock before it expired. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/17/business/kodak-to-compens...

That's when I learned class action lawsuits only benefit the lawyers.

Why would Land have been such a fierce advocate against the government contracts benefiting Kodak? Was he just trying to get some sort of overall business edge on Kodak even though Polaroid had no real skin in the game WRT the govt contracts? He had to know that Kodak would retaliate in some manner yes? I suppose he severely underestimated the potential backlash to his actions?

The history given seemed consistent with the systems he advocated being just better designs, functionally. Maybe he cared the most about that?

Probably realized the USAF's Manned Orbiting Laboratory as a surveillance station wasn't going to work very well. Taking film pictures in orbit, having astronauts look them over and picking the good parts, then scanning the good parts with a slow scanner was a marginal idea. Transmitting all the data to the ground was much more useful.

There was a USAF thing for "we must control the high ground" in the 1960s and 1970s. The USAF had a space school during the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo years. The USAF wanted manned fighter aircraft that could reach low orbit, and proposed programs for decade after decade. It's a USAF thing. If you've had any involvement with the USAF, you know that there are pilots, and there's everybody else. The pilots are in charge. (Among the pilots, there are fighter pilots, and there's everybody else.)

Land famously wasn’t very politically savvy, nor did he want to be. He was simply being honest in his reasoning, by his lights.

Super interesting that even a heavily consumer facing company like Kodak could employ thousands of people on large scale government projects. It definitely speaks to the scale of some of these projects.

$4.4 billion per Keyhole satellite. Comparable to an aircraft carrier. I wonder how they spent that much.

The OG East Coast vs (Mid)West Coast battle.

Huh?

Kodak was (is? meh.) in Rochester NY; Polaroid was in Cambridge, MA.

That’s as about as east coast as you can get.

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