Lâmôlabs

I generally don’t use this blog to provide too much in the way of opinion pieces but given I worked at Kodak for over a decade I felt like I kinda wanted to weigh in on what’s been going on there. I was reading this piece over on Mashable, How Kodak Squandered Every Single Digital Opportunity It Had and felt compelled to reply with my own $0.02 given the lack of accuracy in peoples’ comments.

The gist of the story basically discusses how Kodak missed the boat in 3 different areas:

• digital cameras
• photo sharing
• photo viewing

While these are accurate as some key misses it’s a bit of a disservice to represent Kodak merely as a consumer products company, there were a lot of other products there too. In some ways too many products might have had a hand in why Kodak ultimately failed.

Anyway check out the article. Whether you’re interested in Kodak or not, it’s a good lesson in what can happen to a company if it doesn’t have a clear business objective, and is slow to adapt.

Below are my comments that I provided to the Mashable article

I worked at EK for 14+ years and what most people in this thread don’t realize is that EK is so much more than just consumer products. They have a fairly large plethora of enterprise and business products too. Ever seen a movie? Roughly 90% of all movie film is made by EK. The commercial and government segment was sold off years ago to ITT, and 5+ years ago the health products were sold off and are now Carestream health. What remains? There is still a large presence of Graphics Communications, graphics.kodak.com, which is a myriad of printers, presses, printing workflows, and plate technologies. Then there’s Document Imaging. Again a mix of small and large commercial products.

There were a number of other innovative technologies that people are just starting to recognize too. OLED! EK invented that too. Cholesteric LCDs (google it) was another promising technology that EK just didn’t have the stomach to see through and develop into products.

I doubt the patent portfolio is worth the $2B that some would have you believe. The company is now saddled with an ageing employee base, did I mention that I was one of only a handful of people in their 30′s when I was there, and a mountain of dead wood.

Unfortunately I don’t think chapter 11 is going to do a lot for EK other than allow it to perpetuate for a few more years so that greedy individuals can continue to squeeze every dollar out of the place. The best thing that could happen would be for the key businesses to be either sold off to other companies or spun off so that they can stand on their own.

I had had enough and left last year but this company was at one time a treasure trove of patents, innovations, and talented employees. If I had to pin the blame on anything, it would be the lack of a clear vision of where EK was going. George Eastman had a clear vision of what problem he was trying to solve and he built EK for that single purpose. It’s impressive that the business continued for another 70+ years after his death. Does anyone think that Yahoo, Microsoft, and others will be around for that long without their original core founder(s)? I think there are a few select companies that are able to redefine themselves after the founder(s) “leave” and fewer still that are able to survive a technology shift. EK was able to do both for a period of time, but it eventually caught them just like pretty much every company seems to eventually succumb to their own demise.

Does anyone remember the term 5 and dime? Woolworth Company used to be huge and they’re no more. Unfortunately, I’m thinking we’ll be adding another slogan to the list … Kodak Moment.