Comment by psgbg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by psgbg | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah.

Palm's vs Pocket PC's. Nokia vs the world. Sega vs Nintendo.

Not many wars where decided by technology itself but other things.

Nokia trusted his middle-end low-end market share then android and iPhone came out.

Palm lost it's way when the smartphones came out.

Sega lost because bad decisions. Nintendo also had bad decision but now is staying behind because the ferocity of the fight between Microsoft and Sony.

Kodak had amazing products but it's perfectionist way to do things let them lagging behind.

Kodak and Nokia are really sad stories because both had amazing products but didn't understood the changes around them. (yeah both more recent examples)

Microsoft won their previous wars because understood the previous reality "feature complete but mediocre solutions". I mean, what the people need want but no more just the essential part. So they dethrone Lotus, Wordperfect etc.

About Kodak failure to imagine a world without analog technology : http://petapixel.com/2010/08/05/the-worlds-first-digital-cam...

Very surprising.

Kodak also demoed the first professional DSLR in 1988, and released the first commercially available DSLR in 1991. In fact Kodak, with their series of Nikon based DSLRs, basically owned the professional digital photography market throughout the 90's.

This surprised me and I ended up at this nicely informative page:

http://eocamera.jemcgarvey.com/

By way of these:

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/4382994

http://www.digicamhistory.com/1988.html

I don't think they failed to imagine a world without analog technology. They failed to produce a painless transition.

The had amazing technologies. I had digital cameras of samsung, Sony and Kodak and the Kodak product was the one I loved more.

Sony and Samsung were stupidly weak to sand, bad battery consumption and some other minor quirks. The Kodak camera was ugly as hell but it worked (thinking some parallel to Nokia products).

Kodak thought "our brand is what people buy so if we offer people will buy".

Fujifilm nailed it. Created a diversified products, put a hand to their patents in plastics chemicals and other things and started to sell technology. So they diversified.

Kodak released products over engineered at slow peace. They still biding in analog products, meanwhile their digital products never took off. Kodak was the mayor patent holder in its time in optical, chemical, plastic and other things. But they were a GIANT biding in sell products and never understood their clients. They never understood their technology value and never understood what the market wanted. One day they stopped to sell and Kodak went out of business.

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