After you make the capital investment you still have to pay the staff wages unless you want to be a plant worker doing free shifts five days a week?
...they very well could have sank a couple hundred million into down-sizing their film coating line from scratch into a state of the art, highly scalable and diversified operation that would be the envy of the film & paper coating world. Wiith the ability to maintain a high degree of quality and profit margin regardless of demand for analog products, that to me would have been the perfect outcome.
But we are here now, with film having fallen some 95% over it's glory days in the 90's, prices continuing to rise, corporate shifts by the likes of stalwart Ilford Harman showing me that nothing is on as solid a footing as any of us would like.
...
Why didm't Fuji go bankrupt?
After you make the capital investment you still have to pay the staff wages unless you want to be a plant worker doing free shifts five days a week?
Well of course...and had Kodak done things *perfectly* this would have easily been a non-issue.
They elected a marketing type as CEO instead of a savvy technical type!
PE
Strange you say that because it makes total sense and echoes why my father was made Managing Director of a very large international carpet company in the late 1960's. They wanted someone technical with a long term view at the top,
I remember my father told me back then around the time he retired (roughly 40 years ago) that the marketing and finance people were only thinking short term, he was talking about other companies in many fields and was of course right.
Kodak crashed and burned because they made a knowing decision early on NOT to defend their world-class, world-leading technologies. That included both film and digital. It's as simple as that, really.
When it came to film technology, like it or not, Kodak was in total control. They were the 800-pound gorilla that dominated the field. They had the most money, the best researchers, the best products, the biggest market, and the adoration of generations of loyal customers. Everyone else was just simply trying to keep up.
To those who claim Kodak could not keep up with digital imaging technology, they miss the fact that Kodak invented it. And because they invented it there was a point in time at the beginning where by definition they controlled it completely and were ahead of everyone else, bar none.
But somewhere along the line the decision makers at Kodak were served up and swallowed the infamous "easy digital billions" Kool-Aid. They came to believe that only by instantly and completely abandoning their century-plus of world-class emulsion and coating expertise and products could they lay their hands on those elusive digital billions. And in trying to do so they threw it all away.
In the person of their new CEO they ended up working harder to stop film than they did to start anything else. In building their bridge across the river to the promised land, for every new digital plank they laid down in front, they pulled up two analog planks from behind. Inevitably those dual trend lines crossed leaving them stuck mid-river without a viable path in either direction.
What could they have done differently?
Defended their top-of-the-line film imaging technology (see Sal's post above), marketing it as the higher quality option for discriminating photographers, while they concurrently worked to improve and control their newer digital imaging technology (again, see Sal above) and carefully blended it into their analog product lines as more appropriate for the birthday candles crowd.
Successful companies make their own markets. Kodak was more than big enough, rich enough, and bad-ass enough to have controlled the direction that the new technology would take. They were already doing that with film. There was nothing stopping them from doing it with digital. Except thoughtful foresight.
My dream for Kodak (listen up, all you who think I'm anti-Kodak...) was to be the biggest and baddest imaging company on the planetwhich would only have been an extension of what they already were with film. To have a beautifully maintained and comprehensive portfolio of correctly marketed, highly supported, continually improved, and perfectly price-point positioned film and digital imaging product lines for both professionals and consumers.
But instead they drank the Kool-Aid and ended up all trying to crowd onto that last remaining plank in the middle of a raging river, seemingly clueless about how they got there, and constantly pointing fingers at everyone and everything else for their predicament, while the managers with the biggest bonuses spent their time throwing all of the lesser stakeholders into the icy waters below.
I am still so mad at those guys I could spit...
Ken
I watched Kodak spend a lot of money on projects that failed, such as the Verbatim / Drivetek high capacity floppy drive and the purchase of a failing and floundering Wang computers. I also watched MAC fail from use of the wrong hardware, and the wide fast coaters? Don't get me started on this.
It was the era of the managers "who could do no wrong" I guess. Nothing could stop some of these projects until they had bled the company of a lot of money.
And yet, they could have become a great mover and shaker in the digital world, as they held most of the best digital sensor patents.
PE
+1
Kodak did not listen to me when I worked there, so I left and as always I was right and my bosses were wrong. What can I say?
Yup, I've often said that two things that have destroyed US corporations (and I suppose elsewhere as well) are the MBA (Masters of Business Administration) and the spreadsheet. The MBA taught students to focus on short term goals (their pay was based on short term performance) and the spreadsheet made it possible to play with the financial figures to obtain whatever result was desired.
Sadly the spreadsheet along with powerpoint is fast destroying science and engineering as well. Neither are engineering tools but it is just to easy to fall into using such stuff, all it then takes is for some fast talking and convincing sounding guys to get up the ladder using design by powerpoint and everyone else is forced to do likewise to keep up. It takes a disaster like the space shuttle blowing up to stop it.
The question is, what level would it fall to? Now we know that it would fall 95% or so. What kind of Kodak is left after that fall in sales?
As we can see from nearly everyone who is trying, there isnt serious money making digital products that just produce images. Canon, Nikon, and perhaps Sony are the only real companies making money from selling pure cameras and they are witnessing declining sales year after year.
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