Couldn't find this, it changed to 3:00 after 2:59.
Going back to David's original post.."A dozen years ago"...well, this guy here, had already beaten them and they didn't even know it, a few years before that. Being well ahead of the curve requires genius, and they just didn't have it. Watch this at the 2.99 minute mark..about 20 years ago or so...that's not marketing, that's pure vision of a brilliant mind. http://youtu.be/zvjil4oB0uA
Couldn't find this, it changed to 3:00 after 2:59.
And to continue on your point Max, a brilliant visionary, statistically speaking, typically comes within the company, not a CEO from the outside (ie Perez), I think Photo Engineer should have ascended to the ranks of Kodak back in the day than Perez.....check this out, you will know what I mean....Jim Collins stats....amazing...
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cult-of-the-superstar-ceo-2011-10-07
Undoubtedly Kodak has made wrong decisions....but, IMHO, the real problem is that there will always be unforeseen events and developments which no one can plan for, e.g. who would have foreseen, less than 20 or 30 years ago, the huge changes in lifestyle which would result from developments like computers, mobile phones, and digital photography itself. Did you invest in Apple, Vodafone, etc., when they were tiny companies (or MacDonalds when they had one restaurant)? I didn't!
O.K., big companies have planners and researchers who should foresee these changes. Most do, to a greater or lesser extent of success...Kodak was one of those which, for whatever reason, simply missed the boat.
O.K., big companies have planners and researchers who should foresee these changes. Most do, to a greater or lesser extent of success...Kodak was one of those which, for whatever reason, simply missed the boat.
As a professional buyer who routinely forecasts the fate of mfg corps with a high degree of accuracy, and who interacts with both CEO's and marketing mugwumps frequently, this is all just too familiar to me; and blaming shifting technology for Kodak's demise doesn't really explain things. I've seen all kinds of
US mfg companies weather all kinds of financial storms and competition from innovation and survive for a
century, but then go down in a matter of months due to bad mgt. It's just part of our Wall St culture right now. Like certain other failing corps, Kodak is trying to be a jack of all trades and master of none.
They call it diversification; but I call it, not knowning who you really are. Rather than keeping the home fort secure and defending it first, they've gone galavanting off thirty directions at once, and have forgotten what got them on the map in the first place. A common scenario when someone leading the parade has never done so in this particular costume. Generic CEO's who can run any company, and generic MBA's, have become the death spiral of quite a few honored brands.
As a professional buyer who routinely forecasts the fate of mfg corps with a high degree of accuracy, and who interacts with both CEO's and marketing mugwumps frequently, this is all just too familiar to me; and blaming shifting technology for Kodak's demise doesn't really explain things. I've seen all kinds of
US mfg companies weather all kinds of financial storms and competition from innovation and survive for a
century, but then go down in a matter of months due to bad mgt. It's just part of our Wall St culture right now. Like certain other failing corps, Kodak is trying to be a jack of all trades and master of none.
They call it diversification; but I call it, not knowning who you really are. Rather than keeping the home fort secure and defending it first, they've gone galavanting off thirty directions at once, and have forgotten what got them on the map in the first place. A common scenario when someone leading the parade has never done so in this particular costume. Generic CEO's who can run any company, and generic MBA's, have become the death spiral of quite a few honored brands.
... Generic CEO's who can run any company, and generic MBA's, have become the death spiral of quite a few honored brands....
As generics go, that's how I'd describe this analysis.
they've...forgotten what got them on the map in the first place.
That would be what consumers stopped buying: film, paper, chemistry.
Interesting theory ... after it has been written by knowledgeable people here over and over again, that Kodaks film business has been highly profitable while Kodaks digital business incurred loss after loss after loss in the last ten years.if koduck continued "analog only" they would have taken the dirt nap years ago ..
Personally, I think Kodak made the wrong decision about 13 years ago. If Kodak came out with a $100-150 digital camera instead of APS, they would have cornered the market for digital cameras and would still be relevant today.
Interesting theory ... after it has been written by knowledgeable people here over and over again, that Kodaks film business has been highly profitable while Kodaks digital business incurred loss after loss after loss in the last ten years.
It is exactly this thinking along the lines "film is over and done with, let's do something else" which brought Kodak down. Seeing that phrase parroted over and over again here in this very forum just tells me that Kodak's management was not alone in its misjudgment of the situation.
The problem for Kodak with their "generic CEOs" and "generic MBAs" was not the decline of the film market, but the "boost turnover, ignore revenue" and the "grow or die" mentality.
There's nothing dead-end about traditonal film or printing paper at all. Outfits like Freestyle can hardly
keep it in stock. I've ordered 8x10 TMY film several times this year, and each time is was cut from
a completely different batch. That means they made multiple coatings of a single product. Hardly a loser.
I bought four leftover boxes of 8x10 TMX from the balance of an entire master roll bought by a single
industrial customer. The fact that hobby use of small camera films has diminshed relative to digital
pocket cameras does not mean that even this category is doomed as a viable market segment. The
world population is pretty damn big. But when the "market share" nonsense starts going thown around
on Wall St, rather than hard net profits, then the perspective can be utterly skewed. For market share
is a plastic term that can be manipulated in a thousand different ways, generally for the benefit of a
handful of individual at the top. Kodak has long been a diverse corp and not just a maker of film and
paper. Fine. But if you neglect a division that actually is turning a profit, albeit less than it once was,
just to go speculating on what else you can get into, where you've got a helluva lot of competition
anyway, that's a pretty risky business model.
There's nothing dead-end about traditonal film or printing paper at all. Outfits like Freestyle can hardly keep it in stock. I've ordered 8x10 TMY film several times this year, and each time is was cut from a completely different batch. That means they made multiple coatings of a single product. Hardly a loser. I bought four leftover boxes of 8x10 TMX from the balance of an entire master roll bought by a single industrial customer. The fact that hobby use of small camera films has diminshed relative to digital pocket cameras does not mean that even this category is doomed as a viable market segment. The world population is pretty damn big. But when the "market share" nonsense starts going thown around
on Wall St, rather than hard net profits, then the perspective can be utterly skewed. For market share is a plastic term that can be manipulated in a thousand different ways, generally for the benefit of a handful of individual at the top. Kodak has long been a diverse corp and not just a maker of film and paper. Fine. But if you neglect a division that actually is turning a profit, albeit less than it once was, just to go speculating on what else you can get into, where you've got a helluva lot of competition anyway, that's a pretty risky business model.
...But if you neglect a division that actually is turning a profit, albeit less than it once was, just to go speculating on what else you can get into, where you've got a helluva lot of competition anyway, that's a pretty risky business model.
That's what they mean when they say, "Don't go chasing waterfalls..." ??
There's nothing dead-end about traditonal film or printing paper at all. Outfits like Freestyle can hardly
keep it in stock. .........
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