Looking around at similar companies, Nikon and Zeiss became specialist lens makers, for (eg) medical devices, specialist optics like binoculars, and yes, phones. Fuji got into medical imaging, x rays etc. Its almost like they all realized they were in the image business but in different ways.
One peer I find especially interesting is Corning as they were a similar one-trick pony (glass) in upstate New York. But Corning survived, and Kodak didnt. Gorilla glass for phones, fiber optics, etc are a million miles away from pyrex and labware. Why were Corning able to pivot and thrive, and not Kodak?
Not easy to turn a company around when the knowledge/qualifications/experience of most of your employees becomes almost worthless.
Thats also what made it easier for others (like Corning) to pivot (presumably).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Chemical_Company
Eastman Chemical Company is still doing fine.
https://archive.is/20250424104926/https://www.economist.com/...
[1] https://www.kodak.com/en/company/page/photography-history/
Kodak on the other hand attempted to diversify to those markets in the 80s and 90s but made some terrible investments that they managed poorly. That forced them to leave those markets and double down on film just in time for the point and shoot boom of the 90s and the early digital market. Kodak was a heavy player in the digital camera market up to the cell phone era: they had the first dSLR and were the dSLR market for most of the 90s, they had the first commercially successful lines of digital point and shoots, they had the first full frame dSLR in the early 00s and jockeyed for positions 1-3 in the point and shoot market until the smart phone era. They continued to make CCD sensors for everyone during this time. Ya they missed the CMOS change over and smarthphone sensor market, but that was well after they were already in the drain.
It’s rare to be first AND the leader 20 years later.
There was no upside at all in being first with this particular invention. No lessons to learn, other than "Keep working on this and try to grab all the patents, even though they will expire before anyone cares."
Which why we're all flying on Wright airplanes, using Kenbak Personal Computers, and are all calling eachother with Bell telephones.
Being first to a market and not winning, or not even surviving isn't 'mismanagement on a gargantuan scale'. Especially when it comes to consumer devices, which have no moat or potential for monopoly consolidation.
-Sent from my BlackBerry(tm)
And Bell's telephony network (which unlike consumer devices has a moat) was split up by the courts. I'm talking about telephones. Those devices with a base station, a handle, and a dial pad or a rotor (or sans all that, a switching board lady who will connect you to whomever you need to talk to).
Bell was the first to market with the personal telephone, but for some reason, didn't corner the market for consumer devices.
My father worked there for 33 years. I did an internship in 1984. My boss took me on a tour of one of the buildings at our site - where all disc cameras were manufactured. When I did my internship, the single site where I worked employed 14,000 people. Our start and end times were staggered in five minute increments to manage traffic.
[0] https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/kodak-engineer-ha...
It's just that the cell phones took over that job. (And a dozen other ones too.)
In essence, America was ruined by a kind of fast talking con artistry by people with selfish interests. America has fallen to con artists … “listen here. What you really need to do is help others in my interest, and not help your own in your own interests. That’s the smart thing to do. You see?“
Smartphone cameras and digital distribution of images would have killed them 10-20 years later anyway.
The question of why is CEO and executive pay so high always comes up, and between Kodak and RIM/Blackberry, it's easy to argue the good ones are worth what they're paid, as the ones who tank the company clearly are not.
As for executive pay, I think the biggest problem is that it often seems like the executive class gets richly rewarded whether they succeed or fail. Boeing's former CEO was rewarded more for his failures than most people earn for a lifetime of good performance.
It seems to be the very same challenge that Google is now dealing with and suffering from. My understanding is that they could have beat OpenAI to market, but they also realized it would savage their core cash cow the search-ad ecosystem they’ve built over decades now; so they put on the brakes and effectively gave way to the competition being able to overtake them. They choked under pressure. Frankly, just for that reason Nadal should have already been removed by now, almost 3 years after the release of ChatGPT. But it’s also a sign of an incompetent and out of touch board that he has not been removed.
It’s immensely challenging to make such a leap. It’s akin to an addiction, how do you convince a Google to give up its search-ad meth? It is nearly impossible short of drastic events. You have to have a clear vision.
Ironically, it seems Microsoft has been making these types of hard decisions, but that also probably is because they’ve been under some intense pressure in various businesses for a while now, i.e., they have not really been king of the hill in anything that they are not de facto monopolists, e.g., PC OS. It is easier to pivot strategies when you’re not vested in maintaining something and their dominance over the whole government-corporate PC network allows them room to operate for am the time being. But there is also a reason why AI has been called an operating system. In the AI-scale medium term, Windows and its involvement in a user facing computer network is also doomed.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kodak-digital-camera-inven...
In particular:
"While this may have been a motivating factor to some at Kodak, such concerns did not stop Kodak — or even Sasson — from further developing digital cameras and making several technical developments that led to Kodak's first publicly available digital camera in 1991, the Digital Camera System."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
[2] https://innovationmanagement.se/2017/05/24/the-innovators-di...