When did they stop inventing at Kodak?
Oh about two decades ago.
The thing is, their low-cost inkjet idea would be a great one...
in the 1990s. And that's around when the seemed to start falling behind the curve. Somehow Kodak's research management didn't notice that the consumer innovations sector moves waaaay faster now. Publically-traded companies need to show a lot more long-term vision. If Apple doesn't bring out a shiny new product every other quarter, people think the company is tanking. Long gone are the days when a company like Polaroid could bring out an innovation and then count on it for uncontested revenue for a decade or two.
By and large, the consumer sector has moved from must-haves to want-to-haves. And Kodak is stuck in the must-haves. So they have been completely missing the boat on American consumer trends for, oh, at least a decade.
John, its true that we don't know all the things Kodak was working on, and that is precisely the problem. You cannot raise capital (sell shares and bonds) when nobody has a clue what your vision is. And if the vision is merely catch-up - make the same products less expensive- then that isn't an exciting enough vision to bring in more investment. For example, if Kodak were making heads up night-vision displays for cars something like that, they'd probably be making a killing. Land would have been working toward
that kind of innovation in the 90s. I can name dozens of things like that which would be perfect for Kodak's brand. And they also need to go after and acquire new technologies and make them their own, that's the investment part that is also vital to a big company. But now, Kodak is (by all appearances) poking pathetically at ideas that have been around for a long time and already have somebody else's name on them.