I worked at Kodak as a summer intern in '85. Was the era of the disk camera. Was also my first programming job. Lotus 1-2-3.

Most people today can't comprehend the scale of American manufacturing as it still was at that time. The Elmgrove plant where I worked (one of a dozen facilities in the Rochester area) has over 14 thousand employees. Our start and end times were staggered in 7 minute increments to manage traffic flow.

That none of that would exist 20 years later was inconceivable at the time. The word "disruption" wasn't in business vocabulary. Nor was the phrase "made in China". Some senior technical managers saw the "digital" writing on the wall. But what could they do? What could anyone do? There was no way to turn that aircraft carrier on a dime.

At the end of my summer internship, I attended a presentation that our small team gave to more senior managers at the top of Kodak Tower in the conference room adjacent to President Chandler's office. One of the managers took me to the window and pointed out to me different plants and facilities of the vast Kodak empire spread out across the Rochester region. I assumed like many that Kodak had a bright future ahead because they had a world-renowned brand and excellent scientists and engineers. What many at the time didn't yet recognize was that there was no business model in digital cameras that would employ 100 thousand engineers, managers, factory workers, technicians, and staff. There were certainly no senior managers willing or able to sacrifice the golden goose of film to pursue something entirely different.

One of the best discussions of this kind of issue I've read was Warren Buffet on the shutdown of Berkshire Hathaway's textile business. Berkshire was a textile business when he bought it which faced a decline similar to that of Kodak's film business. His answer, to reallocate capital to completely different businesses that were healthy. It was kind of what Fuji did when they switched from film to cosmetics and Buffett's reallocations allowed Berkshire to do very well rather than going bust.

The discussion is in the 85 letter if you scroll down to "Shutdown of Textile Business." http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html

> Over the years, we had the option of making large capital expenditures in the textile operation that would have allowed us to somewhat reduce variable costs. Each proposal to do so looked like an immediate winner.

> But the promised benefits from these textile investments were illusory. Many of our competitors, both domestic and foreign, were stepping up to the same kind of expenditures and, once enough companies did so, their reduced costs became the baseline for reduced prices industrywide.

This is a great illustration of why capitalism is not inherently innovational. If it is cheaper to exploit workers than to automate, the market will exploit workers instead of automating.

I am not so sure Kodak had any other developed businesses where they could have re-allocated so much capital. Something similar seems to be happening with Yahoo now.

Now China's entire export economy to the entire world is only thirty-something million TEU annually. Figure 50K pounds cargo per TEU and compare, and if I did the math right in my head, one obscure lube oil and plastic resin company sells about 1% of China's total worldwide export capacity.

(All of the above is accurate to about one sig fig, and if China has finally topped 40 megaTEU thats all very nice but doesn't fundamentally change the conclusion anyway)

I mean, that's not realistic to ship across the planet, just too much of it, too heavy, global shipping isn't "big enough" to eat low value product.

Now something high value per pound like photographic film, Kodak would be out of business today in the USA anyway even if film were still in business. Ready to use photo film has a high enough dollar per pound density to be worth shipping across the world.

*The exception being highly sought after material not available nearby.

This.

During my seven years at the Windsor, CO Kodak plant (see my other comment below for more) it was crazy to hear of the heyday (I was there 2002-2009, not the heyday). It was the 2nd largest Kodak manufacturing center (bested only by Rochester) and built in the 60s. It was a sprawling campus of huge concrete buildings with almost no windows (great for film!). The campus had it's own fire department and power plant.

It was a ghost of it's former self when I started but by the time I left entire buildings were vacant. At it's peak the plant had 3,200 employees. A lot of people there had worked in Rochester and from their stories I could hardly fathom the manufacturing operation there being so much larger than ours.

Maybe that's part of the reason Kodak moved so slow - all those buildings and people and essentially small factory cities are not something you can change overnight.

But they do exist in China. Plants in some cities dump sludge into wastelands the size of lakes. Some factories are small towns unto themselves where people work, sleep and live on company property.

We still need to the scale Kodak had for their market at the time, but economics has moved it overseas and the market is totally different.

It's still consumerism though, and a frightening scale. It's just abstracted away from most of the western world, so we don't see it.

In Back to the Future Part III, Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown--the 1955 version of himself--discovers that the DeLorean time machine car has broken down because of a faulty chip made in 1985.

Doc Brown: Unbelievable that this little piece of junk could be such a big problem. No wonder this circuit failed. It says, "Made in Japan."

Marty McFly: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan."

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=made+in+China%...

I remember seeing that in various things, ever since my father pointed it out. It was common enough to exist in daily lingo.

Most of the time it was a synonym for cheap knock-offs.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=made+in+China%...

Could they have bought NeXT in the mid '90s? Then maybe we'd all be walking around with a "smartcam" that also makes calls.

Without divining, based on now-known realities, that they had no insight into, what could have been done?

Apple's total disintegration isn't entirely imaginable at this precise moment, but planning for some dreaded rainy day, what disaster strategies could they use to anticipate a total failure of their bread and butter?

Microsoft probably IS facing this scenario. What can they do?

I do agree with your assessment of AAPL vs MSFT. Apple has ingrained itself into the fabric of our personal lives in a way that would be very hard to challenge. Microsoft never achieved that - because it was run by corporate sales folk.

Apple's undoing, if anything, will be from being to greedy.

Meanwhile, consider that Microsoft was very strong in 2003, but through a few minor misteps, just missed the boat on a some key changes in technology. Then, when the things that killed their advantageous position finally made an appearance, they refused to give chase. Why they failed to jump on the new bandwagons, and how their own boat started taking on water, has a complex story of its own.

But yeah all that business, corporate, government, enterprise activity is probably plenty more than just life support. It's not like I read shareholder earnings reports or anything, though.

I've worked with some of Xerox's workhorse printers, multi-hundred-thousand-dollar systems that can crank out 120 prints per minute, sustained (hot-swappable paper trays, so you don't even have to stop to reload). But all of those were already being dwarfed in document presentation by a freely-available arrangement of software, with a $1,000 - $10,000 piece of server kit capable of kicking out millions of pages per day. A large print shop with several workhorse printers might make 1 million copies/day.

And at a fraction the cost.

Yeah, Xerox completely dropped the ball.

Source: worked tech support for better part of the 2000's and had to get Xerox printers on our networks often. Spent a lot of time updating settings when the contracts renewed and new printers were leased.

I believe you meant to say "that there was a business model".

This was the decade that the Hunt brothers were cornering the silver market. Kodak's practical interest in digital methods was to use less silver while keeping customers happy. The idea was for Kodak to insert a digital step before printing enlargements, to reduce the inevitable grain that came with using less silver. Black and white digital prints were scattered about our home, often involving the challenging textural details of bathing beauties on rugs.

A few of us adventurous armature astrophotography nerds have been trying to remove the bayer matrix off our DSLRs, without destroying the sensor, for a while now. It's unfortunate that there are so few options for true monochrome sensors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1Lgju9L23c

https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/166334-debayering-a-dslrs...

Interestingly, the kodak KAF-8300 is still a very popular option for commercial monochrome sensors.

What? That's amazing! I work in high-speed videography and your father's filter is a part of my daily live. Awesome!

Any thoughts on Fuji's "re-interperetation" of the Bayer-filter in their work on X-Trans?

It was the same thing every year - digital is cannibalizing film faster than we thought, we need to close down X or lay off N people. A year or two of that sure but over and over again and it became clear the executives were just not getting it. Looking back I wonder if they just decided to slowly ride the ship down, extracting nice salaries along the way. I still can't understand how someone - activist shareholders, a board member with half a brain, an executive willing to speak out - didn't make a bigger stink and try to get fresh leadership.

I remember one year at an all division meeting they showed the latest corporate "motivational" video - "Winds of Change" (http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JYW49bsiP4k). We thought finally, they get it and are admitting we've been stagnating and now we're gonna turn it all around. Everyone was super pumped up for weeks.

Then we realized the only thing that had changed was our ad agency who had produced the video.

I spoke with Kodak support people quite a bit during that time and they always gave me the impression that Kodak was not giving them the support they needed to keep up with demand. The ML-500 at least seemed to have been hand-built, and when I called in because it stopped printing yellow or whatever I would often end up speaking to one of the actual engineers. Great for figuring out what was wrong with it, but it seemed really weird that these guys were seemingly fielding calls all day.

The main thing I remember (other than the printers broke constantly) was that after a few years it became next to impossible to get media for it- we'd call our distributor and he'd say "I don't have any this month, try xxx." So we'd call them and they'd give us another lead, and eventually we'd find some and order as much as we could, and then start the process again the next month. We always assumed that most of the stock was reserved for kiosks.

I'd love to hear more about what was going on with that, if you know.

There was a few years there where demand really outstripped supply. We were the only place in the world that made the media for Kodak at the time and I'd say 2002-2006ish the kiosks were really doing well and we just couldn't keep up (good or bad Kodak didn't seem able to predict the market for it's products). They added on and doubled our capacity somewhere around 2005 and then added on another manufacturing center in Rochester towards the end.

It's interesting to hear your experience with printer breakdowns - I always thought of them as real workhorse machines. But then again I was surrounded by dozens and dozens of each model (except the ML 500, we only had 4-5 of those) and there was a full staff of mechanics running around and a handful of them fixed the printers in addition to the other industrial machines / electronics around.

The 6800/6805 was my favorite - we used to take it out to local events and print off 1000s of free 4x6s for people (we'd take some digital cameras too and set up some sort of "scene" for people). Even running non-stop in the 90 degree sun I only had one overheat on me a couple times.

Can't complain too much. We did a lot of school athletic tournaments and stuff like that, we could shoot a team and we'd have 8x10s ready to sell to parents before the kids got off the risers. Assuming everything was working smoothly it was a license to print money!

So there probably aren't any cool abandoned buildings there... The only one I've been able to find is [Kodak building nine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_building_nine) in Ontario.

[0]: http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/kodak-s-windsor-locatio...

[1]: http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2012/01/19/halliburto...

[2]: http://www.denverpost.com/2014/01/20/200-kodak-alaris-jobs-r...

That's just weird.

It looks like they had a rec center, deals with a local farmer to grow a crop on some their land, all the perks of a big old 20th century company, it's also a pretty great location.

Remember the coal pile they used to maintain?

“What about Kodak? asked Bill Ruane. He looked back at Gates to see what he would say. “Kodak is toast,” said Gates.8 Nobody else in the Buffett Group knew that digital technology would make film cameras toast. In 1991, even Kodak didn’t know that it was toast.9 “Bill probably thinks all the television networks are going to get killed,” said Larry Tisch, whose company, Loews Corp., owned a stake in the CBS network. “No, it’s not that simple,” said Gates. “The way networks create and expose shows is different than camera film, and nothing is going to come in and fundamentally change that.”

“You’ll see some falloff as people move toward variety, but the networks own the content and they “can repurpose it. The networks face an interesting challenge as we move the transport of TV onto the Internet. But it’s not like photography, where you get rid of film so knowing how to make film becomes absolutely irrelevant."

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/us/hj_bz.l

Excerpt From: Schroeder, Alice. “The Snowball.” Bantam Books, 2009. iBooks.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.photo/ZnqcQVzAln...

"Right now, 1 Megabyte of memory costs about $45 retail. This will not drop by an order of magnitude in the next decade without a breakthrough, or an economical Gallium-Arsenide process to replace Silicon."

"It's much easier to pass a stack of prints among a group of people than to set up a viewing session on the TV."

It makes you wonder what new technologies we dismiss today will actually start a revolution. Of course, not everyone was wrong about the future of digital film; this guy was spot on:

"In my opinion, the popularity of electronic camera is dependant upon the popularity of computers. If this so call multimedia become a reality, then more people may want electronic cameras."

I love this line. Even in 1990 people didn't believe Moore's Law.

Ouch!

The Nikon D1 didn't come out until 1999, so nine years later, for $6000, for a 2.75mp camera.

Did that even compete with film? Can you put that on the cover of a magazine at under 3 megapixels?

So yeah, it was a safe investment in 1990.

I remember on one occasion my boss, a mid-level executive (head of new slide film research? something like that) asked me what I thought about digital cameras, I think both because I was young and seen as "the computer guy". I didn't own one but I'd read about them a decent amount. I told him I understood they were expensive/low-quality at the moment but the advantage of ditching film and using ever-improving digital tech still seemed huge. I don't remember his exact words, but he couldn't really see the appeal or promise.

The 7-story building I worked in is just a mound of grass last I looked. I have thought from time to time just about the institutional inertia that fights against seeing what's going on and adapting. There were just tens of thousands of people with very highly specialized skills around film and chemicals and processing and dark rooms and paper and so many things most of which simply aren't relevant to a digital photography world.

Now, granted, other film/pre-digital camera companies did a far better job making the jump. I'd argue maybe in part again that Kodak seeing itself as emotionally wed to film while other companies saw themselves moreso as camera/photo companies. That Fuji has been able to survive is more surprising to me than Canon/Nikon/Olympus/etc.

I worked for a company that did some work for Kodak - both directly and indirectly - around some of their software initiatives & partnerships with mobile manufacturers. They were not pretty or well-run projects, to be sure.

Even had Kodak been more aggressive about cannibalizing its film sales with digital, it's unclear how much of its expertise and competitive advantage would have carried over. In any case, it wouldn't have nearly replaced the film consumables business in terms of revenue and profit.

Fujifilm did do better--mostly, current camera line notwithstanding--by branching out into other areas of chemistry. Good read from The Economist here [2] but Fujifilm had tough times too and I believe that they were also significantly smaller.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_myopia

[2] http://www.economist.com/node/21542796?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/the...

[Second link fixed.]

Given that disrupting yourself would have a 100 year payoff period, it seems far better to try and squash any attempts at change, both internally and externally until progress becomes inevitable. Look at the music industry for example, even a few extra years of CD dominance would exceed the profits of all digital music sales ever.

Of course, if you go this route, your incentive is to play clueless and out of touch since even giving credence to the disruptive idea hastens it's arrival. I'm sure there were a lot of executives who were genuinely clueless but this at least shows how otherwise intelligent executives would have a strong incentive to act clueless.

The upside to this is there's no existing bias in management decisions for the new company. Instead, it offers them a potential insider look, and understanding of this new technology..and when the time comes for a pivot, they have something solid to build on.

They're making billions on big, complex, expansive CPUs. Someone like ARM /will/ replace them, at a much smaller dollar volume.

Even at the current 14/16nm nodes, Intel's process is significantly smaller than TSMC or Samsung's [1]. I suspect we will see consolidation (a la GloFo/Samsung) and Intel branching out into being a foundry, but with building 10nm++ fabs running into the billions of dollars, I don't see Intel going anywhere any time soon.

[1]: http://newstechnow.com/plans-launch-14nm-finfet-technology-c...

looks around himself

It hasn't already?

My eye doctor's office is switching to Android tablets, so maybe it's possible.

That said they're relatively niche.

I guess they knew that eventually everyone would have a good enough iOS device and they'd have to reduce the cost of the device to compete.

You could, but you rarely do. The profit margin on the consumer-level DSLRs is really low. They make money from the stuff around it.

Inkjets can do great prints of photos, but only if you pay for the paper and ink.

I think a good analogy would be HP. Legendary lab test equipment up till 1980 or something. Spin off the legendary lab test equipment division into a new company thats successful to this day AFAIK although they rename / rebrand every five years. The remainder tries to coast by selling imported Chinese stuff with its famous name rebranding the cheap import, but the writings on the wall as it crashes.

So for both examples, if your core competency is XYZ and you spin off your healthy XYZ division and don't really have a post spinoff plan, the empty dehydrated husk that remains will wither away pretty quickly.

Essentially you've got what banks call the good bank / bad bank strategy where you split and one fails and the productive part remains. For whatever reason companies like HP and Kodak throw the historical branding into the "bad company" side. But the "good company" sides are healthy and in business to this day.

I'm not surprised they survived, they caught on early and made good gear.

As opposed to Canon cameras that give cryptic errors about lenses 3 days after the warranty expires, HP cameras that used a set of batteries every 60 shots or so and so on.

It's a pity that Asahi/Pentax didn't survive as an independent.

I thought that OpenWatcom was the only one remaining to support DOS (and it appears to have been stagnant for a couple of years)...

(Not that I've done much with DOS - I did write a ~10-20 line program in C to set the serial port to specific settings, but that was all I've done on DOS.)

† He told us one fun story. One of his research papers had been cleared by the censors for publication and accepted by a scientific journal. However, just before the journal went to print, the censors changed their minds. It was too late to fix the layout, so the edition was released with a sheaf of blank pages in the middle. He said that it was the proudest anyone had ever been of some blank paper.

Edit: Apparently, there is no way to private message an HN user. If you have a Reddit account or similar, I can pm you there.

While it seems likely that they remained involved in sensors and also optics, I wonder whether the loss of these secret film contracts may have left them weakened in the late 80s/early 90s (last film-return satellite should have flown in 1986, but was lost due to a launch failure), just when they needed to focus on some new product lines.

Of football games, I'm sure. They always told us they could blow up the exposure to that size, anyway :)

Companies like RIM and Nokia had smartphones. The people running them were smart. Their engineering was good. It had to be because wireless access to the internet wasn't ubiquitous. Suddenly the companies faced the first mover disadvantage.

It's difficult to imagine how revolutionary the technology of Kodachrome was. It utterly disrupted consumer photography and photojournalism and professional photography. The fact that Kodak was experimenting with digital photography in the 1970's shows how out front they were and they were right to treat it as a technology that wouldn't be viable for more than two decades...and one that nobody has figured out how to monitize except via the sale of hardware.

There's probably no plausible alternate universe where Kodak managed to produce sustainable profit from processing and storing digital images or selling media or anything related to their core business. Digital photography moved image production out of retail channels. I could text an image to ten of my relatives without a trip to Walgreens for one hour processing, and $0.08 3x5 prints in an hour available in the mid 1990's was a pretty amazing innovation versus the four or five days and significantly higher prices that were typical in the 70's and 80's.

Kodak wasn't a company standing still. It just didn't have a good way to make money from digital imagery: HP had them beat in the printer ink as liquid gold market and the camera manufacturers weren't going anywhere: optics are still bounded by the physics of optics.

Circling back, I think it wasn't so much people sitting around and thinking "we're Kodak" as it was the fact that Kodak wasn't Nokia and hence didn't have a history of selling off it's mainline business and moving into a new industry. Not that as a publicly traded company in the US that would have ever really been a viable option. Quarter by quarter, Kodak was obligated to maximize stockholder value for the short rather than long term.

Companies become obsolescent. Consider Sun.

    Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its
    executives “suffered from a mentality of perfect products,
    rather than the high-tech mindset of make it, launch it,
    fix it...”
    
    Bad luck played a role, too. Kodak thought that the thousands
    of chemicals its researchers had created for use in film
    might instead be turned into drugs. But its pharmaceutical
    operations fizzled, and were sold in the 1990s.

I don't think it's one of Christensen's examples (it's been a while since I read the book) but IMO the all-time greatest blunder of this type was Sears closing down their catalog operation the same year the first graphical web browser was introduced. The younger readers may not remember this, but there was a time when the Sears catalog sold everything. You could even buy an entire pre-cut house that would be shipped to you for assembly.

They basically had Amazon, and threw it away. Now they're essentially nothing but a subsidiary brand of K-Mart.

What's left of Sears is now owned by K-Mart. (K-Mart is descended from S.S. Kresge, which operated "dime stores". Dime stores were like dollar stores, before inflation.) Now they can go down together.

Not sure if that was a Sears purchase or not though.

IBM, in turn, sold off IBM Global Network and much of their web hosting business to AT&T in 2000.

edit: I forgot that Kodak also had a role in the formation of IBM's Global Services business...ISSC (an acronym which I can't remember the expansion of other than the I was IBM) started as the bundling up of Kodak's I/T services organization, eventually selling completely to IBM.

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

Yes, somebody should have come up with Amazon before Amazon did. But they didn't, and here we are now.

Sears shut down its catalog division in 1992. Amazon launched in 1993.

This is actually my preferred work environment. Fuck profits, I've got a rather short life to lead, and I'd like to get a little enjoyment and intellectual satisfaction for all my efforts.

Has the development of anything really lasting been rushed? "Hey, Stradivarius! Stop dicking around and glue that shit together, we'll deal with it after the sale if the customer complains!"

http://kottke.org/09/02/art-and-fear

The most beautiful things are iterated on endlessly. The first attempt is always crap.

For litmus tests, the MVP approach of make it, launch it, fix it is perfectly justified. Once you have zeroed in on something interesting with proof it is both technically and economically feasible, you can worry about perfection. In a sense, it's the business equivalent of measure once, cut twice.

When I was gainfully employed by a large telecom, very little of what I did found its way anywhere near the market.

Most go to the grave with their masterpiece unstarted, much less signed. Free your mind.

They have three film sinks, including one specifically designed for tray-based large format black and white film processing.

They also have 18 enlargers, including a monstrous 8x10" enlarger: http://pcnw.org/facilities/black-and-white-darkroom/

I bought Tetenal's C-41 kit last night with the Portra, and plan on developing there, as they also have filtered water, film dryers, and Photo-flo :)

The main requirement is a temperature-controlled hot-water bath for warming the chemicals, which are relatively easy to construct with some creative use of aquarium equipment. Buy yourself a digital thermometer from Amazon to verify your chemical temperatures (you should have one anyway for B+W development).

You may also want to consider a rotary development instead of hand agitation. If you can find a "roller base" unit, you can just place a standard developing tank on the rollers and it works fine. I love mine for B+W development too. Works like so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60rYmqkyfDg

E-6 is a little more complex than C-41 and I do not recommend the DIY kits in general. The DIY kits are a simplified 3-bath version of the full 6-bath process and has negative consequences for quality and long-term stability of the resulting slides. Since it's more difficult and the finished product is inferior I recommend just getting it commercially processed.

You can send it out at most supermarket photo centers, just mark "E-6 Process" on the "special instructions" box. It all gets sent to a processing company (often Fuji) and they know what to do with it. Nobody does in-house ("1-hour") processing anymore, sadly.

I live in a relatively mild climate and B+W development usually means measure the temperature of tap water once and go with it for the day. For C-41 it's also a bit harder to keep things at 39C which makers a larger gradient against room temperature than 20C, but in the end I suppose it's not too hard with a water bath.

I just traded two Mamiyas for a Hasselblad 503. The Mamiyas are fine, but I have too many systems to feed now.

Kodak's mangement proceeded to run Creo into the ground through a series of layoffs, remote micromanagement, shuffling things around etc. At the time of the acquisition Creo was profitable (though definitely with some challenges) and had a few growth initiatives that looked promising (all cancelled). Very capable management, good people, and well run. There were a lot of opportunities to create some long term value in different areas but the only Kodak strategy was to keep cost cutting and milk all the businesses to their death.

What was amazing to me is that the CEO kept his job even after Kodak's market cap went below $1B. I forget what that market cap was at the time of the acquisition but probably in the $10-$20B range. Gotta be one of the top ten value destroying CEOs of all times.

For many many years it didn't matter what management did, film kept printing money for the company. Only when things changed you could tell that management was actually incompetent. Before that you didn't need to be competent to keep making money. Kind of like Warren Buffet says, only when the tide goes out you find who is swimming without their bathing suits...

I just saw something on Bloomberg the other day about Kodak finally getting some anti-counterfeiting technology that AFAIK is the same one developed in Creo over 10 years ago (Traceless) released.

EDIT: Another personal anecdote is that the first "real" digital camera I ever used, I'm guessing around 1996, was a Kodak. It was pretty decent. I think the price tag was quite high. At that point in time Kodak had a good reputation in digital cameras. The problem is digital cameras would never replace film as a business even if Kodak went 100% into digital. They needed to diversify.

In my short time in business, I have noticed how rare it is for a company to successfully get smaller and survive- even when the obvious business is going away.

I'm still getting used to the ability to snap a pic and casually text it to a friend instead of trying to describe it.

I just downloaded a phone app that turns it into a scanner, complete with OCR. It's not as good as my flatbed, but it's incredibly convenient.

I feel like I'm living in the future.

My dad had a rangefinder Leica, and he swore by it. But I look at the pictures he took, and they're often slightly out of focus, grainy, under/over exposed, etc. I'm sure great photographs can be taken with a Leica, but you've got to be a great photographer to get them. But for sure they were better than the brownie he had before :-)

Film is the one with 14-15 stops. Plus its automatic S-shaped gamma curve, with gentle roll-off of the highlights, makes it easier to produce pleasing images. Movies, TV shows, and commercials that were shot on 35mm film in the 80s and 90s usually look better than the digitally shot ones today.

Probably because modern directors cannot resist mucking about with the palette so it is all blue and orange. If it's a period peace, they make it all sepia brown. They've reverted to the two-strip technicolor from the 1920's. Arggh.

For 4x5 format it's not "slight resolution" advantage, it's a major resolution advantage. The most expensive sensors these days go in the range of 50~80 M pixels, 4x5 goes way beyond that if you want to use pixels to reproduce the kind of details it provides. That's why film is still used for stuff like very large posters.

That's a dot-pitch of 1400 dots-per-millimetre or 36000 dpi; standard magazine print is 300dpi.

I really can't believe that something higher than that can be useful resolution for billboards unless you're cropping to a very small section of the full image. The stretching of the image with the glue is going to give you lots of distortion, never mind the ridges they usually have in them. http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/3651/what-d... suggests a max working ppi of 75 for an actual reproduction of ~9dpi for a billboard.

A very large poster that you want to see close up I can imagine doing at 600dpi, maybe even 1200dpi; but you're going to need a magnifying glass to see that pixelation with normal eyesight I feel.

Even for film reproduction other errors in the process would seem likely to wash out any higher resolution, like dust on the lens in the cinema [do they have some sort of laser cleaning mechanism??], or indeed dust in the air in the cinema?

E&OE.

The counter-caveat is of course that large format is often shot using camera movements that allow the line of focus to be creatively placed to make the most of the smaller depth of field, so stopping down an equivalent amount is not always necessary.

One thing about its operation that pleased me was it did a much better than expected job of removing the distortion from the page, one thing you won't get from just a photo. I did like the OCR feature, too.

The others claimed to do the same thing.

To grab a large slice of some niche, you need to be invested in exploiting it. In Kodak's case, that meant having all these huge facilities for film technology. There's no other way to be a big player in this niche. The upside is nobody will ever avoid thinking of your brand when they are shopping for film.

The downside is you can't just change direction. If film becomes obsolete, the market in the replacement is not going to be big enough at the stage when you can see it. And its size is in itself what you will be using to judge whether it will happen, so it's quite hard to decide to dump all the old tech in favour of a tiny industry that might run into trouble. I'm sure there were many naysayers pointing out various flaws and potential roadblocks with digital.

If you do change direction, you inevitable step on the toes of someone else in the value chain. You make your own camera, you annoy the camera manufacturers. You want to be a chemicals business? It's full here, too. Remember you're a huge operation, and there's only so many things to do.

We should not mourn the death of large corporations though. Just like in nature, it frees up resources for new players doing new things.

It's stock is up some 200%+ since the spin-off from Kodak in '94 (compared to 400%+ for the S&P500).

If you had kept your Eastman Chemical stock after the spin-off from Kodak in '94, sold your Kodak stock, and reinvested the proceeds into Eastman Chemical, you would have more than doubled your capital, not including dividends.

Kodak did follow up with digital though. They had a digital SLR by 1994 (before Canon or Nikon) and digital cameras for $299 by 1996.

The advantage that companies like Nikon and Canon had are their lenses, and the huge investments photographers made in their lenses is what locked them in to a particular brand.

This is why a lot of traditional camera companies (Konica, Minolta, Fuji, Polaroid) were unable to keep up.

How can you transition from the highest margin CPG product of all time to a new regime where there are almost no marginal costs per use? Kodak had well over 100k employees at its peak and was a global brand just like coke. They even saw their demise decades before it occurred.

But what is management supposed to do in a quarterly environment where CEOs are getting ousted other than double down on their success and cut costs? There was never any real money to be made in digital photography and if anyone was going to figure it out, they certainly weren't living in Rochester.

It is my understanding that Kodak's efforts were too little too late. The organization was driven by the business people and was hemorrhaging money and only staying afloat through licensing and selling off their patent portfolio and the medical imaging devision. They watched their consumer product profits from film evaporate and failed to transition into the digital age.

These designers and engineers that I have learned from and worked with are certainly brilliant individuals. It seems that the organizational culture did not provide them with the creative freedom needed to envision and develop products competitive with those coming from smaller, nimbler companies.

The oddest thing was that they were still trying hard to push the APS format, despite the fact that is was a pretty poor format when it first came out it was now looking even worse when compared to early mass market digital cameras.

There was a certain arrogance amongst higher up managers. A sort of "We're Kodak, we're the best, we dictate the market!" There was a noticeable staff churn problem as a result. I was on a team of 20 of which 14 were contractors.

I can see some interesting parallels between Kodak and Nokia. Two giants who dominated their sectors and just didn't anticipate changes in consumer demand and then couldn't/wouldn't adapt.

[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB869781042786228000

I also remember taking a photography class in 95 and having the teacher say right at the beginning that in 10 years everything is going to be digital. My impression of the time is that everyone knew what was coming.

I think Amazon's ultimate success is predicated on eventually developing a higher margin business.

It seems many previous businesses founded on the low cost producer strategy, e.g. Dell, uses it as a means to get scale, then emphasise higher margin products and services.

When I got to photocd, the management’s focus was on replicating the quality and detail of film in the digital space, and they did not notice/understand that the lower level of quality of digital would still be useful. Their marketing was driven too much by the voices of professional photography and the ad industry’s need for the quality capability of enlargement.

My colleagues and I actually started work on a business plan to use lower resolution digital imaging for applications in real estate and other industries that could use snapshots of lower resolution. We had really just gotten started on this, when management found out via a personal dispute of one of my colleagues and hauled us in for discipline. We stated our case and said we thought Kodak should get involved, but that fell on deaf ears. Our group fell apart when Kodak did not renew one of our contracts, and he went to work for Sony writing their digital image storage software, which became one of the top tools at that time.

The impression I got was that upper management was well aware of the digital advance but completely oblivious to the speed of its progress. They thought in terms of the huge length of time it took to develop new film products and their associated factories. In 1992, they actually thought that digital would not be a serious threat until about 2005. Oops!

All the first Nikon and Canon DSLRs had Kodak technology in them. Not sure how things happened in detail, but eventually Nikon and Canon had their own digital technology, mostly based on CMOS sensors. Kodak had one more CMOS camera of their own - the 14n based on a Nikon body. But while being the highest resolution body at that time, it got mixed reviews. Still at that time Kodak probably would have had enough cash to buy Nikon.

Yet they withdrew from professional digital cameras, the last life sign was providing sensors for the Leica M9 and S. And with no other leg to stand on, the company mostly vanished with the collapse of the film market.

Ironically, the price you pay per roll of film is on an all-time high, so in theory, the business of making film should be more profitable than it was, but the scale just is not there any more.

Part of the problem was obviously that they didn't take digital seriously soon enough. This in combination with what seemed like a poorly run company meant software always lagged behind sometimes by years. For example, it took some time before folks could put video from their camera onto a dvd, and the cd's themselves could only hold 120 pictures while SD cards were keeping thousands. It was a software issue. In addition, some of the retail outfits they contracted through seemed overpriced.

I think the official story was filled with lament over not taking digital technology seriously early on. While I read some stuff about them, it has been some years and I don't know how much was reserved for the workplace environment.

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

Kodak was a darling of the entire business world, for like a century. They printed money, they provided great jobs to hundreds of thousands of people. They were disruptive and put photography into everyone's hands. I think companies have a fixed life and theirs came and went.

Trust me, if they had a big pivot that was blown off, it was in to industrial chemicals or energy chemical manufacturing or something, it wasn't simply a matter of repositioning as an imaging company from a film company.

Tell me, how should Pony Express have pivoted when the telegraph came on line? Kodak, the brand and most of it was in a similar position.

Michael Dell received a lot of criticism for saying in the 90s that if he was CEO of Apple he would wind down the company and return capital to shareholders. But far too many CEOs are blind to this option.

As you probably already know, most people would probably rather take the money as long as it comes in instead of making that bet.

Mind you, at least Sigma managed to get the DP1/2/3M cameras out into the wild, and very nice they are too!

[1] http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/kodaks-first-digita...

“They were convinced that no one would ever want to look at their pictures on a television set,” he said. “Print had been with us for over 100 years, no one was complaining about prints, they were very inexpensive, and so why would anyone want to look at their picture on a television set?”

You are a hugely successful business, and all of your numbers are great, so this indication that some time "far off" into the future you will have an issue? Well you can worry about that when you get there. And senior management will continue to manage "to the numbers." That means sales guys are making their quota, margins are hitting their targets, Etc. And in Kodak's case, when they lost a customer they had no visibility into it, that customer simply stopped buying film and prints. They didn't buy them more cheaply from some competitor (that would have shown up in their market surveys) instead they just vanished.

What was more, their competitors were living off the amateur market. The amateurs who wouldn't buy the professional grade film, and so their competitors died or quietly exited the business while Kodak's core business remained "strong". There was no price pressure on film or processing.

As a result it was easy not to see the fundamental cancer growing in the middle of the film business, and when demand for film started falling off a cliff the company was already half dead. The "fix" would have been to reduce the company size to a point where it didn't have the capacity to meet all of the current film demand, because by the time the company had shrunk that far demand would have shrunk to meet it.

This is all obvious looking backwards, and to some other peoples points the executives all retired and got pensions and payouts. As an institution, the company failed. There was no process for re-creating the company from the ashes of the dying product line.

-- They developed a massive patent portfolio including many digital photography patents that had an estimated value of $1.8 to $4.5 billion at the time of their Chapter 11 filing (read the article if you're interested for why it got sold for far less - it's fascinating) Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-lowballing-o...

[Can any public company plan on a multi-decade time scale? This is an anthropological, sociological, cultural and business question of interest in the academic literature.]

Others, along with Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen, have written extensively on the general cultural difficulty of spending money now for an uncertain future while making money presently on a multi-decade investment.

Xerox was originally under the thumb of Kodak, in Rochester, New York, as the maker of photographic paper, chemicals and related equipment, known as the "The Haloid Photographic Company" (halides -- bromine and related chemical elements, along with silver, being the key photographic chemicals of photography) and founded in 1906.

The owner-leadership of the Haloid company in the 1930s and 1940s knew the company was doomed in the long-run with their then-present capability. Later on, it turns out that neither the Xerox of 1995, nor the Kodak of 1995 understood the necessity of having a keen paranoia of their technology's changing future and future unreliable income.

Xerox's, Kodak's, and other corporate stories are both studied in graduate-level business and engineering programs looking at the risks of failing to plan for change, the end of patent monopoly and market domination, and the cultural and financial necessity for understanding, committing to, and planning on the demise of the present technology currently sustaining an organization.

The Haloid company was not crushed by Kodak, in part, because of antitrust laws, but it was always in danger of failing in a competitive market dominated by Kodak, and from the 1930s onward had committed money to find and own a technology that was sustainable and patentable to survive: the Haloid company invented the term "xerography" (dry image transfer).

After the growing success of xerography in the late 1950s, and 1960s, after near-death experiences bringing the technology to market, the culture of developing and ultimately surviving on the new market of new-but different technology was lost in the profits of xerography in the minds of the then-present executive leadership, addicted to the amazing profits of xerographic patents: thus the results of new research and technology failed to be supported to make it to market.

Yet the Xerox company's creations, developments and discoveries are the present backbone of the present era of computing: ethernet, laser printers, personal computers, graphical user interfaces, Smalltalk (see also Object Oriented Programming and Virtual Machines, and the like). Look up the history of Xerox's "Palo Also Research Center (PARC). The Smallalk VM was the foundation of Self, and the later Java VM, with the addition of a couple decades of further work.

See "Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer" by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander for that story, published in 1988, nearly three decades ago. The cultural failures and non-response parallels are remarkable.

Doubtless there are dozens of similar reports on the Kodak cultural inertia and failure to understand change, in academic articles, and books. Google is your friend.

Kodak leadership thought that they could not profit from digital cameras, and early and expensive technology could only be used by large institutions (NASA). As costs dropped, Kodak thought that their market was commodity consumables, so they licensed the technology they created. The consumables chemistry and photographic films and papers market ended with with the rise of digital photography (no negatives), and digital, color ink-jet and xerographic reproduction of images.

EDIT: halide elemental chemical family

The Bell System (that is, the old, pre-divestiture AT&T) routinely planned on a multi-decade basis. Switches built and installed in the 1920s and 1930s often lasted 40+ years. This was fine back when electromechanical switching technologies were all that existed, but little did they realize that, when they developed electronic switching in the late 1950s/early 1960s that the pace of technological change would far outstrip their own long-term planning.

By the mid-1970s, their competitors were introducing fully-digital central office switches, and the #3 ESS (a small switch for rural use) was still a reed-relay switch, while competitive switches such as Northern Telecom's DMS-10 and Stromberg-Carlson's DCO were fully digital. Never mind that Nortel and Stromberg would eventually vanish as well.

There were few enough takers for the #3 ESS that when equal access to long-distance networks was mandated, it was found that it would cost less to rip-and-replace with the digital #5 ESS than to write new software for the #3.

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

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/imagenes_ciencia/flyingobj...

It would seem logical that Kodak could have potentially been a possible supplier.

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

I think where Kodak lost it was failing to bring high end technology into compacts. Kodak had a big stake in professional digital cameras before 2000. It's completely wrong to say they weren't in the market. In fact they almost owned it. The first professional digital bodies were being sold by Kodak in 1991, and the former sensor division is still going under another name.

But they didn't seem to understand that the same technology was going to move into affordable prosumer cameras, and eventually into consumer snap cameras.

They certainly didn't understand it was going to move into mobile phones, where it would kill consumer film cameras. And they totally failed to anticipate photosharing culture online.

To be fair, I think almost everyone underestimated mobile. I had a Nokia 9500 Communicator with a camera at around the same time I had the Kodak. The quality was pretty bad, and there was nowhere near enough bandwidth to consider photo sharing.

Now I have an iPhone with a camera which can give an old SLR a run for its money, and photo sharing is no problem.

The difference is that Kodak were creating products - technological artefacts for a single purpose.

Jobs and co were creating a culture - a set of experiences that include hardware, software, marketing, and media attention.

Culture companies are much more likely to kill product companies in the same niche than vice versa.

Absolutely not. Older DSLR had lower resolution, but level of detail is not all there is to image quality. Dynamic range, bokeh, control over perspective, the ability to take pictures of moving targets at higher iso without the picture becoming too grainy and the ergonomics are all things that even a 15 years old DSLR can do better than an iPhone 6s. You just can't get pictures like these out of a smartphone : http://i.imgur.com/kV2CfBE.jpg http://i.imgur.com/0jugE5B.jpg http://i.imgur.com/2bV1HJz.jpg

These all come from a Nikon D1h, samples from dpreview. The D1h was released in 2001. Nowadays, even the lowest end DSLR will outperform it in almost every single way, apart from build quality. Even so, that old top end camera still outperforms smartphones where it counts from the point of view of art photography. In 2001, I still used film cameras because good DSLR like the D1h were out of my reach, but these days, even a $300 DSLR will just obliterate anything you could do with a smartphone.

And then there's the fact that most casual photography is taking pictures of other humans, and that the wide angle lens of smartphones distort perspective and make people weird up close. The iPhone has a 30mm equivalent which is very unsuited to taking pictures of people. http://fotografeando.me/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/focal-len...

http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/6a/10/3b/6a103beeaa37...

You can see here how even the 35mm is plainly inadequate compared to the 50mm focal length.

The Nikon D1h, Canon 1D, etc... definitely has better bokeh, dynamic range, perspective control, etc than even the best smartphone camera on the market the today, but consumers just don't care that much about actual photographic quality. They see a DSLR today and think "bulky", "another set of batteries I need to charge", and "how do I share photos to Snapchat with that thing?"

Most smartphone cameras are more than good enough for daylight shots, selfies or Instagram, and if you are not into photography, that's good enough.

I will grant you that I might have trouble getting the shot of the racing car with my current crop of digital cameras. But the other two ... I guess I'm not just seeing the difference.

Well, the iPhone may be nice if you're near the object you want to photograph and it's a bright sunny day, but:

- it horribly sucks at low-light photography, you can't just screw an iPhone to a camera tripod to get a beautiful shot of the night sky

- there are CF and SD cards with WiFi support, which can be used in virtually any camera

- good luck taking a good distance shot with an iPhone

- good luck putting an iPhone onto a stabilizer (e.g. Steadicam)... and no, software can't replace that.

Steadicam for iPhone

Modern smart phone cameras are very very good.

But you can change the lens on SLRs, and that's something you can't do on iPhone.

And you can change the aperture and shutter speed on an SLR, which gives you a lot of control over the image.

https://momentlens.co/shop/#lenses

The miniature bayonet mount is really nicely done.

Yeah Shoulda Coulda Woulda, it just seems there were less barriers to survivial and thriving than simply egos and business as usual attitudes.

I think the digital camera and the market crashed from the dotcom bust worked in tandem to take down Kodak.

They had some really smart people working there, and they invented some really important tech that was used beyond cameras. Think image processing for satellites etc.

http://matmarrash.com/blog/2012/8/28/working-with-large-form...

I've experimented with similar film (Ilford Ortho Copy), but I generally prefer the look of contrasty skies (filter out blue and green), which is the opposite of what orthochromatic film will look like. (This is why older B&W photos have stunningly-bright skies, contributing to the characteristic look of photos from that era. Panchromatic film didn't exist, and the sky is very bright relative to terrestrial objects when all you have is blue light.)

Generally the stuff gets the job done, though. Here's a test shot of Ilford Ortho Copy:

https://goo.gl/photos/qkretyMoozuNXczXA

Versus the same scene on Tri-X 320:

https://goo.gl/photos/cwCn4c7XUzNM3xuh8

It was cloudy, so you don't really see the overexposed sky effect, but you can see how the trees on the top right look darker. Presumably there was some greenish moss on there or something.

https://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Pop-Bottles-Pills-Electronic...