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hinkley 3 days ago

The real pisser is that Kodak was ahead of the curve on digital photography before they decided on five year thinking instead of fifteen year thinking.

They paid for a modified version of Mosaic that could handle high resolution images. I want to say 4 megapixel before anyone else even had digital cameras. They were going to have you send in your images and then order a CDROM via a website with the ones you wanted to keep. Because storage was terrible at the time. I don’t remember if prints were an option, but I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t.

soneil 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'm not convinced it was really their strategy on digital that killed them. I mean it's clear their film camera business was a "razor blades" model in support of their film business - then they tried to approach digital the same way, trying to figure out what razor blades they could sell us.

But it was largely working - Kodak were the market leaders[*] in digital cameras right up until the smartphone came out. The market for non-SLR/mirrorless cameras is down >98% from there. They could have owned 100% of that segment and they'd still be a nostalgia marque today.

Digital all but killed the film segment, and then smartphones all but killed their digital segment. They were winning in dead markets.

* In the US, according to some contemporary BusinessWeek article that wikipedia's sourced. But I'm willing to accept that it's within a margin of error of successful in that segment.