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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

Kodak give the world the first digital camera[1]. It took mismanagement on a gargantuan scale for them to fail in this manner.

[1] https://www.kodak.com/en/company/page/photography-history/

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Kodak managed the film and camera market about as well as they could. The mismanagement was a failure to diversify. The total digital camera market excluding cell phones, would be a fraction of Kodak's film business back in the film era. The film and camera story is a popular one but is fundamentally wrong. The shrinkage of the camera/film market was inevitable. You can look at Fujifilm who does sell cameras and basically owns the remaining film market with instax, however neither of those sustain the business they are effectively a chemical and medical manufacturer who dabbles in photography now.

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.

We all know that being first does not mean success, and it’s not “gargantuan” mismanagement.

It’s rare to be first AND the leader 20 years later.

That was in 1975. It took multiple decades for digital camera technology to become cheap and practical for the mass consumer market, and another decade or two before it was good enough to be taken seriously by professionals.

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."

> give the world the first digital camera... mismanagement on a gargantuan scale

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)

Obviously not, but Wright and Kenbak weren't dominant in their markets and Bell was broken up by the courts, so those are pretty poor examples you've chosen there.

They were the first to market, though. That's my point. Being the first is a small advantage that can be lost for a ton of reasons, most of which don't require gross mismanagement.

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.

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