Long time no post eh? I want to write more on here, so my target is to write a post once a week (or fortnight, or month, or 6 months if it comes to it) on interesting things I’ve seen, read or thought about. It’s the 7th of January, so I’m still on target! Just.
I’ve always found stories of the demise of empires and companies fascinating. Like a murder mystery, where the detective picks over the other characters and the events to locate the flaws in the murderer’s cunning scheme, it is interesting to see what decisions, strategies and ideas failed, what was and wasn’t done and ultimately led to the organisation’s demise. Was whatever put the company under something quick that no one would have seen coming? Or was it coming for a number of years and whatever put the company under was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I was therefore interested to read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Kodak’s demise, all the more so as I do like to take a good photo every now and again. It seems that Kodak will be filing for bankruptcy protection in the next few weeks and the article tells the story of Kodak’s recent history and why it’s future is so bleak. From the article and its Wikipedia page, in the 70s, Kodak was an unassailable behemoth, owning 90% of the US film market and 85% of the US camera market. Even here in the UK Kodak is a name synonymous with photography and clearly has the size to show that if it’s going under something is seriously up.
What killed Kodak appears to have been a combination of contentment and lack of imagination of behalf of the directors for the last 40 years and digital photography. Alone neither of these represent much of a challenge, in fact Kodak pioneered digital photography, manufacturing Apple’s QuickTake digital camera and later releasing their own. But digital photography didn’t need film, which is where Kodak made most of its money as it pulled the good old trick of selling the cameras cheaply and charging high for the film. And once cameras don’t need film, all you’ve got is cameras that you’re selling below cost to get the customers to buy your film… And in case not needing your film isn’t bad enough, most digital cameras nowadays are in phones and the like, not the distinct compact and SLR cameras that were popular for digital photos even 5 years ago.
I guess the lesson to take from Kodak is to always be looking ahead to the next thing (or even the next next thing) in whatever area you’re in. Despite trying, Kodak seemed to have entered the digital market too slowly, probably fearing its film sales would slump as a result. Of cause what they forgot is that not only would their film sales slump, but so would their competitors when the world was wowed by the new technology they had developed.
It’s also very interesting to see Kodak being described as the Google of its day, a massive campus with all sorts of facilities one could wish for, pulling in engineering graduates and apprentices from all over the place… all it took was some overly cautious managers making a few bad calls and 1 piece of disruptive technology…
“How the mighty have fallen! The weapons of war have perished!” – 2 Samuel 1:27
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