I’m an engineer who worked for Kodak from 1983 until 2009. Mostly the information herein is true. The film boys were so strong they refused to allow the company to evolve. Around 1998 I was set to move to a desktop printer development project that already had a prototype that produced film quality images for pennies per page. I showed up the morning of my first day and at 9am we were called into a meeting and told the project was canceled. Kodak did other stupid things like getting rid of Eastman Chemical and the medical imaging business, both natural places to evolve to. And the video was absolutely correct about our patent portfolio. We had significant intellectual property with imaging semiconductors and image management software that we basically gave away instead of looking at how we could grow a business from them. Working there was a mixed bag. We had great technology and the work was very interesting but by the late 1990s we were always under threat of layoff. At one point Kodak sold my division to a German company only to buy it back 5 years later. Things were pretty crazy.
While not involved in high technology like Kodak, I was working in another job, the U.S. Postal Service from 1994 on and saw major changes. One little thing changed everything and that was the internet. Overnight we lost all our major first-class mail to online billing. Magazines started to disappear. We got a lot of packages due to online purchases and then Amazon hit the world like a nuclear bomb. As a photographer, the loss of Kodak, the rise of cellphone usage for photos, the rise of social media ruined photography. I can find more photographers at a Best Buy than walking the streets or at amusement parks. Things changed rapidly in the 1990s and it hasn't slowed down one bit.
Kodak is a prominent example that once great American companies are ruined by MBA trained businessmen who don’t understand technologies. The same is happening to Boeing.
Kodak had many of the most arrogant people in management ever saw. My PhD neighbor was one, a complete hack, he earned a good living and retired in time before complete collapse of the company.
@trnlft Kodak would not have been able to make smartphones even in thier best days. So much bureaucracy,closed minds and arrogance. It was inevitable for them to go under as they did.
I remember working in Ohio in 1997 and heard a radio broadcast that Kodak had decided to concentrate on film and that they didn't believe digital was the future. Made me raise an eyebrow. Everyone knew in 1997 that Kodak was going to collapse, and Kodak executives refused to wanna have to care.
When I was graduating from Rochester Institute of Technology with a BSEE in 1978, I desperately wanted to work for Kodak. But I messed up the on-campus screening and never even got my foot in the door. I ended up spending most of my career at a different Rochester NY technology company, spending just about every morning looking forward to figuring out answers to very interesting engineering problems. My last manager there had been let go from Kodak late in his career, losing his "guaranteed" pension in the process. I found it ... difficult... to deal with the emotional contrast between how his career turned out and mine. I think of him often after all these years of retirement.
My father retired from Kodak and was called to Rochester many times for meetings. It definitely hurts to watch. I'm sure a doc on Xerox would probably be even more painful for those attached to that company.
I worked for xerox in the UK in the 90’s you could feel the bitterness of the stuff they had lost but a bizarre desire to stay the same company that had done it. The older execs had done very well out of copiers let’s just plough on with that until I retire. I remember with great excitement they’d show us a printer that could do short run books compared to a press as if that was a future.
Kodak is like Nokia. They were happy to retain their earlier market share but failed to innovate over time. When they realised their sales are failing, then it was too late to innovate and catchup their competitors.
Nokia was massive back then! Everyone in the Philippines had a nokia phone around 96 to very early 2000's. If you had another brand, you were an outlier.
@@lordseph I still have a Nokia 7250i which was a brilliant phone and travelled all round Europe with me. At least back then mobile phones were truly mobile.....a full charge on my 7250i lasted 7 or 8 days before needing to charge up (and the phone was left switched on 24/7). Nothing "smart" about smartphones which need charging up every couple of days so hardly 'mobile'! Oh and the audio on them is damn awful!!
@@Bulletguy07 Battery took a hit when we need better image quality, data and multiple apps. It lasted a week but you would use it just for phone calls while today we are addicted to phones so no batteries would last long. Also, battery size decreased as technology improved it became smaller and had to match the new designs, impacting durability.
I worked for Kodak for 11 years just as digital begun. I remember going to a Kodak event where someone from America held the floor and announced “ Film is forever! Digital will never replaced film”. We all just looked at each other and wondered what world was this man come from. Within 12 months all Kodak owned Kodak Express stores in Australia were closed with Kodak stating we don’t own shops.as I moved onto other photography stores including my own for a while Kodak fell further and further behind. I loved my time at Kodak Andy miss it so. But what a failure the management were.
All I can think of after watching this was, shouldn't Kodak have move into chip making lithography in the 1970's, at the point when chip making was exploding? They had the scientists, the chemical plants, the optical know-how, and so forth. Right now ASML owns the market Kodak should have developed. Photographic film is 'photochemistry'. Photochemistry has billions of variations, from algae making sugar from CO2 and water to chemically etching very thin metal parts. Variations include electrophotochemistry and radiochemistry. Kodak could have been a company in the middle of solving the 'Air to Fuels' problems of capturing CO2 from the air and making it into fuels and chemicals. They could also have done work in silicon photovoltaic cells, and later, in perovskite solar cells. These things would have made Kodak enormous in comparison to what it was at its peak.
Fuji Film built about 8 plants in our small town here in the south. They made imaging plates, color paper, VHS, quick snap cameras. Now 30 years later they sold the buildings and moved on. I think they still have the small quick snap camera plant. Oh yes there were a number of Kodak people who moved down here to work there.
It's not really innovator's dilemma at all. If they disrupted with digital camera they would fail even faster. They tried to get into the digital camera space but that entire market imploded.
the loss and inability to identify and harness genius-- compare the ppl at the top of Kodak-- to Steve Jobs-- no college degree, rather odd guy, but innovative, passionate and a risk taker, and a dreamer. I bet at Kodak you could not find a single guy like Steve Jobs-- and it was their HR's that made damn sure a guy like him did not even get thru the door.
When I was in college in spring of '92 when a Vice President was also taking that night class for calculus 4 (which is theoretical calculus) and he sat right next to me and asked me to help him! So I did because I felt bad for him (he was in 40's) and he ending up passing the course and was so happy of my help for him he took me out to 5 star restaurant he liked!
This started decades ago Film era). While teaching photography/graphic arts/printing in the 80s, I contacted Kodak for their latest technical publications. I was told that they no longer had qualified people to write the materials. Kodak had offered early retirement to employees. All their best people to the package.
I still have a Kodak point & shoot 35mm digital camera 6.5MP from 2007 that uses a removable SD card and uses simple AA batteries. It sill works flawlessly today and takes pretty damn good photographs too. It is a shame Kodak missed their mark.
@@gman6081 I was fortunate enough to shoot 10 rolls of Kodachrome film before it was discontinued and the chemicals for processing disappeared forever. I believe it was due to strict EPA regulations for the ending production of the chemicals. What a shame and such an icon chrome film. It has never been reproduced by any film or digital camera manufacturer even in 2024! We really lost something special in Kodachrome ! ! !
When the Star desktop computer system was demonstrated to the management at Xerox, one person said that the company was based on making paper documents and asked why would they go into a system that eliminated paper. Same short-sighted management as at Kodak
Growing up until I went into the Army my family only owned Kodak cameras. While in the Army purchased a made in Japan 35 millimeter camera and only used Kodak film. Even shot pictures in black & white and slides. Purchased my first digital camera over 20 years ago and never came across a Kodak digital camera in stores. Sad they dragged thier feet to start selling digital cameras. Worked at a large newspaper years ago and they remind me of Kodak with thier heads in the sand when the internet started The Phila Inquiry built a new press room maybe 22 years with with 10 or 11 top of the line Goss printing presses. They laid off over 500 people ,sold the building and had one of the largest newspaper printed in another state for 3 years. Now that newspaper stopped printing and has thier newspaper printed 90 miles away providing 36 hour old news while you can obtain it immediately over the world wide net.
The market dried up. Magnetic tape became unprofitable once factories in China could produce similar quality for a third the cost, or less. It took time. Audio and video tapes also went obsolete entirely after that, so they were right to bail out. TDK did the same thing. They had a great US plant making VHS tapes and even spent a fortune adding a production line to make blank recordable CDs. Highly profitable, high demand. Great. Virtually as soon as that plant was online, CD factories in Taiwan and China came out with much cheap media. TDK couldn't match the price. They were better quality. But consumers didn't care about that. They went by price. The whole TDK factory was torn down and erased from existence. Huge loss.
Do you know why they closed? To cut costs on the falling market since they were now venturing into different business fields. Now doing medical devices, cosmetics, drugs and of course photography, that's the point Japanese understand better than the west. Diversify or else die out
I worked for Kodak for 19 years then my department got sold to JnJ. Medical products became Ortho Clinical Diagnostics which made blood analyzers . It was the best on the market. But bad decisions at the top were made and the company went $6B in debt and they had to sell off a lot of their subsidiary products and at the time we were sold to JnJ. Kodak Refused to except the digital world and got left behind. When they woke up to it it was too late. So for me I wound up retiring from JnJ. My time was carried over and I had 31 years of service. All in all it was good for me as I got good health care compared to Kodaks. When I was at Kodak I was in the X-ray screen manufacturing division. which was made up of only 15 people who are mostly all dead now because of all the chemicals involved in manufacturing X-Ray screens. I'm one of the lucky ones as I didn't work hardly at all with all those poisonous chemicals. Kodak wast a huge toxic waste dump that killed 10s of thousands of workers over the years unknowingly.
Much of what was Kodak still is around today - chemicals, healthcare, defense. They kept selling off divisions so that they could focus on their 'core' imaging business. The trouble was that over the course of a century they built up a company that was great at making small, incremental improvements to their main film product. So, their business processes were all about being methodical, careful and taking a long time to make sure that everything was perfect. That was the opposite of what was needed when photography moved into the digital world where things change quickly. They developed a lot of other great consumer products - about a year or more after other companies had already introduced better ones.
My uncle was a research chemist at the Rochester complex, and one summer as a kid I got to stay with him & the family... besides getting the most amazing tours of the plant and many other high tech companies, I got to hear about his adventures trying to come up with their own version of the Polaroid camera. (this was back in 1969) Unfortunately, after years of research and development they introduced their instant camera to the market......and they were immediately sued by the Polaroid corporation, and they lost. It was pretty much the end of my uncle's career. Interestingly, about the same time Polaroid came out with The Swinger, a cheap instant camera that kids could have fun with. The pictures were black and white, and the film came with a squeegie of acetic acid that you had to wipe across the picture (the same as the stop bath in film development) I had a ball with mine, used to carry that thing all over the place. What was I then, 12, 13? Because they could never sell that today, with a sponge of acetic acid you'd handle with every picture - just wash your hands if it stung a little..... I wonder if my uncle knew about their forays into digital? He was pretty secretive about his work - I had no idea until years later exactly what he was working on, all I knew was that it was some kind of camera...oh wow, I remember photo CDs....they just seemed superfluous....
The "how" is essential. Because there is always a better/cheaper/faster way to do something. You can't simply run away and hide and pretend it isn't there.
I had three Kodak branded digital cameras in the early 2000s, the first one had a faulty autofocus, the second one worked OK but was poorly specified, and the third one had a light metering failure so I bought a camera from Fujifilm and the build quality was far better and gave me great service. Today my camera of choice is a Canon DSLR. During my 35mm Film days I used a couple of 35mm SLRs and I found Fuji 35mm film to be better than Kodak.
Back in the 1940's Kodak was offered the patents and development of the copy machine, but turned it down, hard to believe in how the copy machine would have been right up their proverbial alley. But they saw no market for it. This is how Xerox corporation came to be. Can you imagine in how the copy machine would have saved Kodak today
Interesting that even though Kodak passed on copier technology, the innovation stayed in Rochester with Xerox. Speaking of Xerox, they fumbled bringing the personal computer to market.
@@redcomic619They fumbled majorly. Although up to present day, the UI design paradigm on personal computers was inspired by research at the then renowned PARC in Palo Alto.
XEROX - another great example of stodgy thinking and missed opportunity. They invented the mouse/icon graphic interface and did absolutely nothing with it, which is why Bill Gates is a billionaire today.
Imagine discovering you’ve created a technology that is going to put you out of business. You have billions invested in (and make billions) in film and film processing and here’s something that makes all of that unnecessary. Honestly, I don’t think Kodak stood a chance.
If they invented digital camera earlier it would only accelerate their decline. They did carve a space in digital camera but that entire market imploded. So no matter what they would not survive.
Companies pivot all the time. It just takes strong leadership and vision. Fuji did it, Nokia did it, even look at a company like Microsoft who transitioned from desktop software to cloud.
@@RyanMcCarvillRight. Kodak could have made a smart phone. Or, they could have made cameras for smart phones. Seeing the camera is such a big selling point for smart phones. Imagine the iPhone having a "Kodak camera" of the latest and greatest.
@@LynxStarAuto their biggest asset was their patent portfolio which they could have used to pivot to any number of imaging use cases with a bit of a moat around them, yet they sold the patents for a fraction of what they were valued at just to keep the legacy business going for a bit longer.
Rolls Royce produced the best piston engines. Now they produce the best jet engines. If You're the best, You must be the first who makes the step into the new direction.The alternative is to fail, or to be a hero in some conspiracy theory, like the window glas or the lightbulb companies are
I was born into a Kodak (Recordak) family. We moved to Rochester in 1967 and my dad died two years later of cancer. His office mates came and painted our house! My first camera was a Brownie, my first digital was a Kodak...but they missed the boat as they clung to the consumer film market. Sad.
Kodak was popular during my childhood. Them days I would peddle my bike for miles and always pass a Kodak booth were people turned their film in to be developed. It was expensive for a lot of families. Digital cameras forever ended that nightmare.
As soon as you could take digital photos without having to buy FILM and having to pay to get the rolls developed, that was the end of Kodak, they adopted the technology too late. I well remember what a PITA it was having to buy rolls of 36 exp film, shoot the roll, and pay to have it developed and wait a week to get prints back, and many times some frames didnt come out, or in some cases the roll didnt advance because it's track didn't engage right. I was so glad when you could take unlimited digital photos and see them instantly!
You just pretty much summed up this entire video - without the video's overly dramatic endless blabbing & annoying sing-song narration. They took forever to make just a few points. Another thing I'd add to your comment is - how quickly the quality of digital photos improved - to the point that digital photos usually looked better for everyday needs than film pics, esp. bc almost no one enlarged or even printed the pics they took on their phones.
We had shoeboxes of old pictures to go through! What will our kids and grandkids have? A SD card they can’t read? An old phone they can’t charge? Or will we keep up with that cloud subscription in 50 years?
You can still have shoeboxes of old pictures...buy a decent photoprinter. They're cheap. And they're not some creepy guy at the drugstore developing everyone's photos.
I had tons of photos that I took for over 30 years. mostly taken with Kodak film and/or a Kodak camera. I gave my photos to a family member for safekeeping and now they are gone. Not sure whatever happened to the photos and didn't want to ask. The end result is that all those fond memories from the photos that I took, are now only in my mind. Physical photos are great but many things can happen to them.
It’s simplistic to say Kodak would have been saved if it had switched to digital photography. If Kodak had gone heavily into digital they would have either only delayed their demise by a few years, until mobile phone cameras took over, or they would have had to become a phone manufacturer. To do the latter they would also have had to develop further innovation by way of email and app solutions. An overwhelming development challenge. Their only real option would have been a merger or cooperation with a computer or phone manufacturer and even that stood a high chance of ending badly. They stuck to what they did best but the market disappeared. Their entire business model was based on film and processing - the cameras were only ever a small part of the overall enterprise. It’s a bit like the situation faced by saddle makers when the car took off - the market retracted by 95% very quickly and their expertise did not transfer to anything else. They were left to service a small specialist market, rather like photographic film makers are now.
One thing that nobody banked on , was how quickly the digital medium would develop. In the early 2000's it was thought that it would take 20 years for digital to match film guality.
in 1985 I graduated with a degree in electronics. We had been given major assignments on digital imaging, as at that time Japanese manufacturers were pouring millions into developing digital cameras, it was widely known in the electronics industry that they would be mass-marketing digital cameras within a few years. In 2002 I had a Japanese digital camera at work, which I used to take pictures of work projects. It was only 640 x 480 resolution though.
The bean-counters always take over after pioneering engineers invent something new. They immediately fire the pioneers and ride that new thing into the ground. - Boeing - Blockbuster - Remington - All legacy launch companies - The list goes on
We’re seeing the exact same thing happening in the automotive industry right now…certain manufacturers are completely failing to see and acknowledge a revolutionary change coming to the automobile industry
Executives are supposed to be visionary, strategic, focused on long-term successes. Many are just underwhelming employees that know how to do little more than put their energies into maneuvering the next promotion.
My wife and I are Realtors. I was a really early adopter of Digital and Photoshop. Seeing all the benefits, cost and time saving it provided. It will be interesting to see how AI will shake everything up. Good and bad?
I worked for them in mid 00's as their IT was partially outsourced. It was such a strange place. All inside was run still like it was the 80s. The old, wooden furniture, the sandwich man coming daily, the old school work culture, the lotus notes they used, while everyone else was on outlook. It all felt like it has been frozen in time. Later on they had security checking every car going in and out, as you would drive up to your building, the area in north London was massive, by then they dismantled a lot of buildings, just empty lots. But the security was tight, all booths checked, looking for people stealing whatever where was left I guess. I didn't enjoy the atmosphere there, not because of the people but because of how ancient and dead it felt. A skeleton of what it was, and you could feel that their IT was there left to support the small remaining team and int users.
The first person to take digital pictures was a Kodak engineer. When he offered his invention to the Kodak management he was simply brushed off with the words "We are a chemical company!" Sic transit gloria mundi!
Microsoft, Google and Apple are pretty nimble. Gates turned Microsoft around focusing on the Internet. Unfairly? maligned Balmar laid the groundwork for Azure cloud services. Nadella seems to be pushing the company to new highs via AI.
Learning what? Putting creepy (even more than the baseline) invasive ai bs in there devices , Building data centers that use up huge electricity amounts ,the existing for cloud storage, in the near future for ai systems , big data will kill probably the climate
Kodak was like Xerox and perhaps a ton of other entities that didn't stir in the right direction. They were kings in their product lines. For any entity to invest/gamble a substantial portion of their wealth into an unproven unknowns is mesmerizing.
Great documentary. I find it interesting that a friend of mine worked for Kodaks flight department he told this story almost to the T. He said that near the end they had a big overseas trip to make a business deal that would keep them out of bankruptcy,but it failed. He said that when they were all boarding the plane to go back to New York there was a lot of long faces. He overheard one of the guys say. Well we did the best we could. Within a month the flight depart closed and they filed for bankruptcy. Very few things remain the same. Improvise Adapt Overcome.
I remember Laura Tyson, Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1995 and 2nd Director of the National Economic Council from 1995 to 1996 under President Bill Clinton was a Director of Kodak since 1997. TYSON RESIGNED THE DAY BEFORE KODAK DECLARED BANKRUPTCY. Apparently her job was done after 15 years as a Director.
I’m 46…..grew up with film but quickly embraced the first digital cameras, then DLSR, then life gets crazy with working & kids, so then my iPhone, then my Samsung and now my Google pixel 8 is plenty good enough camera for me. I would argue my age group is at the end of the “Kodak moment” era. I’d guess most people younger than me (millennials) wouldn’t even what that is anymore… maybe they heard their parents say it but they’ve never used it. Whatever generation is after millennials would have no idea what it is! Innovation is so interesting. It is even more interesting to look back on it with a fine tooth comb after we’ve had the new technology for years.
With digital cameras, you don’t need film. It was film, not the camera, that sustained Kodak. So even if Kodak had pioneered digital cameras, their dominance was doomed. The best that Kodak could hope for, was to continue in business, probably much reduced in size and status. Maybe Kodak’s unspoken approach was to squeeze the existing business to get most profit in the here and now.
This reminds me of the Business School leson about Marketing Myopia. What business were the Railroads in? (transportation) What business should Kodak have realized they were in? Imaging? (Imagine if Xerox & Kodak had collaborated on joint ventures in imaging: medical, industrial, commercial & consumer. Having a Cash Cow in a portfolio with Rising Stars is nice, but ya gotta keep it healthy for it to live, let alone be able to adapt.
Strickland is incorrect at 1:46. "Kodak" did not begin in 1880 and the first Eastman camera was not patented until 1888. In 1880 Henry Strong and George Eastman became partners to produce Eastman's new dry plate coating mechanism. In 1881 they started the Eastman Dry Plate Co. The word Kodak came about in 1888. In 1889 they incorporated and changed the name to The Eastman Company. 1892 they reincorporated and called the company The Eastman Kodak Co. Also, Strickland does not acknowledge the inventor of the digital camera at Kodak in Rochester, Steve Sasson and his supervisor at Kodak, Gareth Lloyd. They developed the camera in 1975 and received a patent in 1977. I don't believe they worked for Kodak in Japan.
The digital camera was developed in Rochester. Kodak didn't at that time didn't have the vision. They were loosing market share, not acting on their own discovery of new technologies and fell of a cliff. Unfortunately government regulations pushed Kodak and others out of business.
@@hawkeyetec Correct...EPA and anti trust law suits helped kill the company. The first anti trust suit lasted twenty years and resulted in the government finally backing off. It still cost the company millions of dollars and bad headlines. The instant photography law suits were the fault of the then corporate leaders at Kodak. No one at Kodak had the vision or agility to move from film to digital, plus fund the traditional business. Perhaps the only lasting win is that many pro photographers and movie makers still prefer using the traditional film products invented by Kodak. Other lasting legacies were the way Eastman and Strong treated employees, providing decent wages and accepting their suggestions to improve conditions. Offering the government photo intelligence technology during WWI. This help was was initially refused because of the anti trust suit, but later accepted. At the end of WWI George and Henry wrote a check to the US government, equal to all the profit they made from their government contracts. Kodak was also one of the most prolific promoters of war bonds.
@@hawkeyetecKODAK’s lack of vision had nothing at all to do with government regulation. Not every historical development fits into a right wing framing narrative.
Makes we wonder if Kodak had embraced the digital camera, set it in a phone with their own brand they would be where apple is today, and this documentary would be about apple's past history.
They did! Kodak manufactured 100% of Apples digital camera's. Kodak themselves had the #1 selling digital camera in 2005. In 2007 Apple came out with the iPhone. Samsung in 2009. Smart phones hurt Kodak not digital. How are they supposed to magically know cell phones would be a thing.
@@trnlft Kodak was irrelevant by the 2010s, they had mastered the art of digital sensor imaging and color conversion and were leading the way in the 1990s but had relied on Canon and Nikon for their bodies. The camera/lens companies took over in the 2000s and Kodak didn’t develop their own digital lens and mount system the way Fuji did, the only film company that survived the transition to digital.
A great documentary, which surprises you doubly due to its tragic background. It is not the analysis of a company's bankrupcy but of human blindness. Congratulations!
Am seeing this and am thinking about Intel, such an amazing company that just stopped innovating and now its losing market share to the likes of AMD/NVIDIA and TSMC
Intel would be gone by now if not for two things: their Israeli branch came up with the Core processors and immediately revolutionized Intel's whole line. That single thing saved the company. The other thing was how so many buyers only want Intel. They have the mindshare with that base. Even now with the 13th/14th gen disaster, people still insist they will only buy Intel. The rest of the market has rightfully laughed at them and bought AMD or even ARM.
I went to RIT and graduated in 1999. I lived about 2 miles down the road from the Eastman house downtown. I remember getting to tour the Kodak factory as a student of photography. Really neat documentary.
I still have an old Sony digital camera I bought in the mid 90s. Its a pocket camera the size of a brick! It cost me silly money to buy but the resolution of the photos was excellent. After that I went through a few Canon SLR's but now have an "ancient" Panasonic TZ10 which is a true compact/pocket camera and light enough to carry around all day. Still takes excellent photos.
Sony has a number of wonderful tiny, pocketable cameras for us. I have some large Sony cameras, but I am looking at the ZV-1 as it can easily fit in my pocket for those times where a camera will not be welcome.
I knew someone that worked for Motorola, was shocked when the boss put his feet up on the desk and said, ok we have done it, own the handphone business.
I think the story of Kodak parallels with other US companies. GM, Bethlehem Steel, and many others died (or are in the process of dying) due to lack of innovation, or worse embracing innovation in panic mode and throwing the entire budget on unproven technology (like elecric vehicles). I worked at Bethlehem Steel when they were the world's second largest corporation. They were too late to acknowledge new steel-making techniques that were better, cost less and produced higher quality steel. The outcome is history. Right now US Steel, Bethlehem's major competitor is in the process of being taken over by Nippon Steel Corp. Innovation/diversification is key to success, long term
I moved to digital as soon as I could afford it. I built up a full Canon DSLR kit, spending far more on the camera upgrade path than I ever did on film. Eventually, I ended up using my phone 95% of the time, and sold my dusty Canon stuff a few years ago, along with my Olympus OM4-t film camera.
I remember growing up in Rochester and riding thru the Kodak area. All the parking lots full to the edges with worker's cars. By the time I left Rochester at 22 yrs old, it was starting to thin out. One of my dad's good friends got laid off after 11 years not missing a single day. His wife eventually left him. I think he was trying to get a job that matched Kodak and it just never happened. Very sad. When I went back in 2016, its a ghost town. Just empty lots. Xerox is a shell of itself too. Sad to see.
Deming once wrote about being the best and still going under. You could have been the absolute best carburetor manufacturer, but if you didn’t pivot to fuel injectors, you’re done. Re: “Kodak moments”, nobody calls them that anymore, that’s how far removed from relevancy they are.
Kodak was a pioneer in FILM. They never, ever occupied any presence in the camera market since...well....forever. And they were absolutely doomed when digital photography emerged as the successor to film. Kodak failed because it was doomed to fail because the only thing that received any focus was film. It really is that simple.
Working in the offset printing industry for many years, all we used was Kodak film! As the printing industry changed and died so did the need for offset print film all contributing to the decline of Kodak! They should have seen it coming sooner and shifted gears into something more in keeping with the times and the future! Kodak sold off its manufacturing buildings to have the cash to keep paying executives that did nothing to keep the business going…….sad to see what Kodak is today!
You see that all of the time - absolutely ridiculous C-suite salaries and bonuses while the company is spiraling, then they still get a "golden parachute" as the company folds or files for bankruptcy.
I went to photography school in Boston in the mid 70's. I miss the tactile handling of film and the chemicals / dark rooms .. it was a time long lost now .
I was born and still live in upstate NY. General Electric was the big employer in the small city I grew up near (Schenectady). Electricity, light bulbs, appliances, medical imaging, and Giant turbines were made here.T.V. was developed here, too. Like Kodak in Rochester, G.E. lost its prominence, it seems, because they diversified too much and/or stopped taking chances, relying on past success too much. Time moves on, whether you want it to or not. Be ready to do the new or die.
Interesting. I grew up with film but seldom Kodak. I used Agfa for colour and Ilford for black and white. I immediately started using Ilford XP1 when it was introduced. It was magnificent. I could never dream of a Hasselblad though! I think AOL, Nokia and Ploaroid are other companies that could well be compared with Kodak. Maybe Boeing will join them.
I'm just a consumer and not knowledgeable like the business like many of the other commenters. Still, I have questions based on what I remember growing up. 1) Evidently Polaroid didn't catch on in a large way, but why? Did Kodak feel no threat from a company that produced instant pictures in the 1960's? 2) There was a realization over the years that the earlier color pictures we took were fading. All the pictures were becoming off-color. I believe it was even in the news. Didn't that send people to other film manufacturers en masse? 3) Did Kodak ever venture into the high end camera market? If I were to buy a high end camera (remember, I'm just Joe Consumer, not an expert), I'd never even think of Kodak. I'd go to Canon.
Xerox is another Rochester story of soaring from greatness only to bury your head in the sand when change comes. Unlike Kodak, Xerox invented the future. Networking. Laser printing, the GUI, the work that eventually founded Adobe of Photoshop fame, and more. Xerox had all this stuff but did virtually nothing with it. They invented the future and threw it away. The irony is that Kodak looked at Xerox and began entering the same markets, like production printing. Xerox had a successful product in that market. Kodak came out with one a lot like it. Kodak had little success selling theirs and wound up licensing it out to several other companies to rebrand as their own. They looked at Xerox and wanted a share of the pie but they failed to see how small the pie was. Xerox is nothing but a shadow of what it once was. Kodak copied the wrong company.
In 2010 my sister brought several disposable cameras to our July 4th bbq and the kids were playing with one. I said “Stop wasting the film!” My 9 year old son responded “What’s film?”
Interestingly News Corp would be a titan had the management not interfered in the running of Myspace when it was vastly more popular than Facebook. It makes one wonder about the scandalous amounts being paid to senior executives.
26:20: The Kyocera VP-210 came out in 1999. It was a phone with a color camera. It is so typical of these kind of academics to not have a clue what they are talking about. Kodak in 2001 would NOT have been the first to put a camera in a phone! 📷☎
I was on the floor of The Chicago Board Options Exchange in Chicago for decades. I still remember the days when EK was a super busy flyer of a stock. Before that, so was PRD, Poloroid. Ahhh yes, the good old days.
The data and the research was there, the rumours were doing the rounds decades ago. For firms that were flush with money and the ability to hire consultants, there’s no excuse. The brand had the leverage to expand into cameras, printers, chips, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of HP today.
I purchased a Kodak digital camera in 2001. I had an uncle who bought a Kodak digital camera around the same time as well. Kodak had digital cameras in the early 2000s and they were quite good cameras, mine was 3 megapixel which was quite advanced at that time. Using a photo printer (Epson R-800) the shots were as good as film for normal sized photos. The documentary skipped the Kodak digital cameras such as the one I still own, but haven't used in years.
Thanks! how would I have figured that out? I tried using the microphone button on my phone to figure it out, but it didn't work even after trying it several times.@@PaleBlueDotCitizen
I collect Kodak cameras. I just the way they reflect not only the progress of technology but the aesthetic design of generations. I also have a huge respect for George Eastman. A giant of his generation. A true humanitarian. Still hard to beat Kodak slide film.
Not mentioned is Kodak's Center for Creative Imagining (1991-1994) in Camden, ME. Dedicated to digital photography. It was a world class facility. I was lucky enough to visit around 1992.
Alot of my family is from Rochester, most of them retired from kodak before the fall. Crazy to see what downtown rochester looks like now, compared to the hey day of Kodak
My marketing professor: "Destroy your business model before someone destroys it for you!" I worked for Xerox in the 1990s. Their mistakes are legendary because they gave away technologies like windows OS and the mouse that other companies took and are among the largest companies today.
Stubborn CEO that runs the company --- same with XEROX. The Xerox Alto is a computer system developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the 1970s. It is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers, and its development pioneered many aspects of modern computing. The Xerox Alto is the first computer designed from its inception to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface (GUI), later using the desktop metaphor. ... The first machines were introduced on 1 March 1973, a decade before mass-market GUI machines became available
I grew up saving money to get my pictures printed by Kodak To this day my mother has the yellow envelops full of pictures. I'd definitely buy a product from them again. I'd wouldn't even mind if they sold film again. Revealing film is a magical thing.
It's hilarious that the first consumer digital camera was fumbled from the bumbling hands of Kodak into the far more incompetent hands of 90s Apple, where dreams went to die (Copland, Pippen, Newton, etc.). Apple of the 90s knew NOTHING of innovation.
In my college days, there’s always this question “With digital photography, will film be obsoleted?” People at the time will use the example when colour photograph invented will black & white photography get obsolete? But I didn’t believe that at the time, which is like comparing apple to orange!
I always admired Eastman Kodak. George Eastman is a distant cousin. My father had one of those folding cameras that used 620 film. I used it a few times, and for many years I used Kodak film exclusively. I don't think this video provides the full picture. In 1995, when I was working for a NASA research center, we purchased a high quality Kodak digital camera for use on UAV missions. There was nothing like it available retail. While a lot of the facts are true, the narrators have a tendency to over simplify. I have also heard that Kodak's partnership with Creo was what really killed them. I don't know the details, but having worked for Creo I would tend to believe that.
The non-stop background music/noise killed it. Remove the noise and re-upload. Documentaries today, running relentless noise in the background - have become tools of physical torture. History and Education by physical torture - ha ha ha
Shhh🤫... If they did that, UA-cam would copyright it and have it off the platform... They did that with Lucy Worsley's History of Romance in 2015. The copy was perfect but it was removed in 3 years time...
In the UK the head of the digital imaging division proclaimed "I'm the head of digital imaging and I know nothing about digital imaging." Unfortunately the company that I was working for offered him a job as a director after he was made redundant.
Kodak invented the first digital camera! Steve Sasson invented the world's first self-contained digital camera for Eastman Kodak Co., in 1975, changing the future of photography and transforming an industry. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Sasson was always drawn to exploring electronics.
Anyone that takes a great company like Kodak and drives it into the ground belongs in jail. Just unbelievable how talent, innovation, and resources can be wasted so much. What a disgrace.
Fuji needs to bring down the costs of their chrome films! Fujichrome film over a decade ago was reasonable but not inexpensive for the hobbiest. Today, that same roll of film costs 5X more ! ! ! From $8.00/roll to about $40.00/roll ! ! ! That's is insane ! ! !
Corruption, greed, power hungry (everyone probably wanted to be top boss) and gross mismanagement, led to the total collapse of such a gigantic company. I still have many of their products, but I won't get any parts for them. 😢
I’m an engineer who worked for Kodak from 1983 until 2009. Mostly the information herein is true. The film boys were so strong they refused to allow the company to evolve. Around 1998 I was set to move to a desktop printer development project that already had a prototype that produced film quality images for pennies per page. I showed up the morning of my first day and at 9am we were called into a meeting and told the project was canceled. Kodak did other stupid things like getting rid of Eastman Chemical and the medical imaging business, both natural places to evolve to. And the video was absolutely correct about our patent portfolio. We had significant intellectual property with imaging semiconductors and image management software that we basically gave away instead of looking at how we could grow a business from them. Working there was a mixed bag. We had great technology and the work was very interesting but by the late 1990s we were always under threat of layoff. At one point Kodak sold my division to a German company only to buy it back 5 years later. Things were pretty crazy.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
sounds like Phillips and TSMC
Thanks for sharing it with us 👏👏👏
We used that printer at Epcot, Walt Disney World 1999
While not involved in high technology like Kodak, I was working in another job, the U.S. Postal Service from 1994 on and saw major changes. One little thing changed everything and that was the internet. Overnight we lost all our major first-class mail to online billing. Magazines started to disappear. We got a lot of packages due to online purchases and then Amazon hit the world like a nuclear bomb.
As a photographer, the loss of Kodak, the rise of cellphone usage for photos, the rise of social media ruined photography. I can find more photographers at a Best Buy than walking the streets or at amusement parks.
Things changed rapidly in the 1990s and it hasn't slowed down one bit.
Kodak is a prominent example that once great American companies are ruined by MBA trained businessmen who don’t understand technologies. The same is happening to Boeing.
Agreed. More skewed psychology...
no
Or possibly private equity companies.😊
No vision and imagination.
@@999timepass thats cia fbi
Kodak had many of the most arrogant people in management ever saw. My PhD neighbor was one, a complete hack, he earned a good living and retired in time before complete collapse of the company.
Blockbusters had arrogant people too and look what happen to them lol. You got to change with the times!
@@tayjones8552 So Kodak should have been making smart phones?
@@trnlft Did I say they had to make smartphones?
@trnlft
Kodak would not have been able to make smartphones even in thier best days. So much bureaucracy,closed minds and arrogance. It was inevitable for them to go under as they did.
@@tayjones8552 Smart phones are what killed Kodak so I assume that's what your saying.
I remember working in Ohio in 1997 and heard a radio broadcast that Kodak had decided to concentrate on film and that they didn't believe digital was the future. Made me raise an eyebrow. Everyone knew in 1997 that Kodak was going to collapse, and Kodak executives refused to wanna have to care.
What a bunch of dim-witted leeches
That was suicide.
As a photographer of more than 40 years i still use kodak film. it is the best. digital photography sucks to this day.
The same thing is happening to Toyota and the rest of the legacy car manufacturers right now.
@@youarenotme01 Always one lemming in the comment section. Bet you watch UA-cam on your Sony Betamax too.
When I was graduating from Rochester Institute of Technology with a BSEE in 1978, I desperately wanted to work for Kodak. But I messed up the on-campus screening and never even got my foot in the door. I ended up spending most of my career at a different Rochester NY technology company, spending just about every morning looking forward to figuring out answers to very interesting engineering problems. My last manager there had been let go from Kodak late in his career, losing his "guaranteed" pension in the process. I found it ... difficult... to deal with the emotional contrast between how his career turned out and mine. I think of him often after all these years of retirement.
I was born and raised in Rochester. Hurts to watch. Xerox and Kodak.... so much innovation and so many missed opportunities.
My father retired from Kodak and was called to Rochester many times for meetings. It definitely hurts to watch. I'm sure a doc on Xerox would probably be even more painful for those attached to that company.
I worked for xerox in the UK in the 90’s you could feel the bitterness of the stuff they had lost but a bizarre desire to stay the same company that had done it. The older execs had done very well out of copiers let’s just plough on with that until I retire. I remember with great excitement they’d show us a printer that could do short run books compared to a press as if that was a future.
Their skewed psychology is making them smaller.
you fell for it
@@petergilchrist2805
The point is that the academic crowd is fogged. Not all fell for it just the ones in control.....
Kodak is like Nokia. They were happy to retain their earlier market share but failed to innovate over time. When they realised their sales are failing, then it was too late to innovate and catchup their competitors.
Nokia was massive back then! Everyone in the Philippines had a nokia phone around 96 to very early 2000's. If you had another brand, you were an outlier.
@@lordseph I still have a Nokia 7250i which was a brilliant phone and travelled all round Europe with me. At least back then mobile phones were truly mobile.....a full charge on my 7250i lasted 7 or 8 days before needing to charge up (and the phone was left switched on 24/7). Nothing "smart" about smartphones which need charging up every couple of days so hardly 'mobile'! Oh and the audio on them is damn awful!!
Apple didn't build the first PC.
Classic example of not wanting to cannibalize an existing business. However, if you don’t do it, somebody will do it to you.
@@Bulletguy07 Battery took a hit when we need better image quality, data and multiple apps. It lasted a week but you would use it just for phone calls while today we are addicted to phones so no batteries would last long. Also, battery size decreased as technology improved it became smaller and had to match the new designs, impacting durability.
I worked for Kodak for 11 years just as digital begun. I remember going to a Kodak event where someone from America held the floor and announced “ Film is forever! Digital will never replaced film”. We all just looked at each other and wondered what world was this man come from. Within 12 months all Kodak owned Kodak Express stores in Australia were closed with Kodak stating we don’t own shops.as I moved onto other photography stores including my own for a while Kodak fell further and further behind. I loved my time at Kodak Andy miss it so. But what a failure the management were.
All I can think of after watching this was, shouldn't Kodak have move into chip making lithography in the 1970's, at the point when chip making was exploding? They had the scientists, the chemical plants, the optical know-how, and so forth. Right now ASML owns the market Kodak should have developed.
Photographic film is 'photochemistry'. Photochemistry has billions of variations, from algae making sugar from CO2 and water to chemically etching very thin metal parts. Variations include electrophotochemistry and radiochemistry. Kodak could have been a company in the middle of solving the 'Air to Fuels' problems of capturing CO2 from the air and making it into fuels and chemicals. They could also have done work in silicon photovoltaic cells, and later, in perovskite solar cells.
These things would have made Kodak enormous in comparison to what it was at its peak.
Fuji Film built about 8 plants in our small town here in the south. They made imaging plates, color paper, VHS, quick snap cameras. Now 30 years later they sold the buildings and moved on. I think they still have the small quick snap camera plant. Oh yes there were a number of Kodak people who moved down here to work there.
no accident
There thinking was: Why change when we are making billions doing the same thing.......Why rocks the boat.
@@fiatcurrency8135 they still could if they used " can do" logic.
It's a frame of mind. Chose even keiled or not, the results tell all.
Shoulda, coulda, didn’t ah….shet!
Great example of the innovator‘s dilemma. It takes courage to actually disrupt yourself and choose short-term pain over long-term demise
Company ceos only look at the next quarter as they know they won’t be around in 5 years time.
Yep. They're usually thereto smash and grab.
It's not really innovator's dilemma at all. If they disrupted with digital camera they would fail even faster. They tried to get into the digital camera space but that entire market imploded.
So they should have been making smart phones?
the loss and inability to identify and harness genius-- compare the ppl at the top of Kodak-- to Steve Jobs-- no college degree, rather odd guy, but innovative, passionate and a risk taker, and a dreamer. I bet at Kodak you could not find a single guy like Steve Jobs-- and it was their HR's that made damn sure a guy like him did not even get thru the door.
When I was in college in spring of '92 when a Vice President was also taking that night class for calculus 4 (which is theoretical calculus) and he sat right next to me and asked me to help him! So I did because I felt bad for him (he was in 40's) and he ending up passing the course and was so happy of my help for him he took me out to 5 star restaurant he liked!
This started decades ago Film era). While teaching photography/graphic arts/printing in the 80s, I contacted Kodak for their latest technical publications. I was told that they no longer had qualified people to write the materials. Kodak had offered early retirement to employees. All their best people to the package.
I still have a Kodak point & shoot 35mm digital camera 6.5MP from 2007 that uses a removable SD card and uses simple AA batteries. It sill works flawlessly today and takes pretty damn good photographs too. It is a shame Kodak missed their mark.
That was likely supplied from an Asian manufacturer
@@gman6081
I was fortunate enough to shoot 10 rolls of Kodachrome film before it was discontinued and the chemicals for processing disappeared forever. I believe it was due to strict EPA regulations for the ending production of the chemicals. What a shame and such an icon chrome film. It has never been reproduced by any film or digital camera manufacturer even in 2024!
We really lost something special in Kodachrome ! ! !
That camera was a rebranded Olympus
Kodak couldn't/wouldn't even find the mark. it wasn't as though they tried and failed at digital photography. They didn't even try.
When the Star desktop computer system was demonstrated to the management at Xerox, one person said that the company was based on making paper documents and asked why would they go into a system that eliminated paper. Same short-sighted management as at Kodak
Fuddy duddy dead wood management types.
Growing up until I went into the Army my family only owned Kodak cameras. While in the Army purchased a made in Japan 35 millimeter camera and only used Kodak film. Even shot pictures in black & white and slides. Purchased my first digital camera over 20 years ago and never came across a Kodak digital camera in stores. Sad they dragged thier feet to start selling digital cameras. Worked at a large newspaper years ago and they remind me of Kodak with thier heads in the sand when the internet started The Phila Inquiry built a new press room maybe 22 years with with 10 or 11 top of the line Goss printing presses. They laid off over 500 people ,sold the building and had one of the largest newspaper printed in another state for 3 years. Now that newspaper stopped printing and has thier newspaper printed 90 miles away providing 36 hour old news while you can obtain it immediately over the world wide net.
Fuji came to our southern town 30 years ago to make color paper, vhs tapes, images plates and quick snap camera. They sold everything and left.
The market dried up. Magnetic tape became unprofitable once factories in China could produce similar quality for a third the cost, or less. It took time. Audio and video tapes also went obsolete entirely after that, so they were right to bail out. TDK did the same thing. They had a great US plant making VHS tapes and even spent a fortune adding a production line to make blank recordable CDs. Highly profitable, high demand. Great. Virtually as soon as that plant was online, CD factories in Taiwan and China came out with much cheap media. TDK couldn't match the price. They were better quality. But consumers didn't care about that. They went by price. The whole TDK factory was torn down and erased from existence. Huge loss.
Do you know why they closed? To cut costs on the falling market since they were now venturing into different business fields. Now doing medical devices, cosmetics, drugs and of course photography, that's the point Japanese understand better than the west. Diversify or else die out
I worked for Kodak for 19 years then my department got sold to JnJ. Medical products became Ortho Clinical Diagnostics which made blood analyzers . It was the best on the market. But bad decisions at the top were made and the company went $6B in debt and they had to sell off a lot of their subsidiary products and at the time we were sold to JnJ. Kodak Refused to except the digital world and got left behind. When they woke up to it it was too late. So for me I wound up retiring from JnJ. My time was carried over and I had 31 years of service. All in all it was good for me as I got good health care compared to Kodaks. When I was at Kodak I was in the X-ray screen manufacturing division. which was made up of only 15 people who are mostly all dead now because of all the chemicals involved in manufacturing X-Ray screens. I'm one of the lucky ones as I didn't work hardly at all with all those poisonous chemicals. Kodak wast a huge toxic waste dump that killed 10s of thousands of workers over the years unknowingly.
Much of what was Kodak still is around today - chemicals, healthcare, defense. They kept selling off divisions so that they could focus on their 'core' imaging business. The trouble was that over the course of a century they built up a company that was great at making small, incremental improvements to their main film product. So, their business processes were all about being methodical, careful and taking a long time to make sure that everything was perfect. That was the opposite of what was needed when photography moved into the digital world where things change quickly. They developed a lot of other great consumer products - about a year or more after other companies had already introduced better ones.
My uncle was a research chemist at the Rochester complex, and one summer as a kid I got to stay with him & the family... besides getting the most amazing tours of the plant and many other high tech companies, I got to hear about his adventures trying to come up with their own version of the Polaroid camera. (this was back in 1969) Unfortunately, after years of research and development they introduced their instant camera to the market......and they were immediately sued by the Polaroid corporation, and they lost. It was pretty much the end of my uncle's career.
Interestingly, about the same time Polaroid came out with The Swinger, a cheap instant camera that kids could have fun with. The pictures were black and white, and the film came with a squeegie of acetic acid that you had to wipe across the picture (the same as the stop bath in film development) I had a ball with mine, used to carry that thing all over the place. What was I then, 12, 13? Because they could never sell that today, with a sponge of acetic acid you'd handle with every picture - just wash your hands if it stung a little.....
I wonder if my uncle knew about their forays into digital? He was pretty secretive about his work - I had no idea until years later exactly what he was working on, all I knew was that it was some kind of camera...oh wow, I remember photo CDs....they just seemed superfluous....
I grew up in Rochester in the 60’s and Kodak was huge. So sad it’s demise.
Companies forget what the core business it. For Kodak it was helping people capture their memories. How was not important.
So true. Your the only person I've seen to put that into words.
@@raybrown4845 thanks
The "how" is essential. Because there is always a better/cheaper/faster way to do something. You can't simply run away and hide and pretend it isn't there.
I had three Kodak branded digital cameras in the early 2000s, the first one had a faulty autofocus, the second one worked OK but was poorly specified, and the third one had a light metering failure so I bought a camera from Fujifilm and the build quality was far better and gave me great service. Today my camera of choice is a Canon DSLR.
During my 35mm Film days I used a couple of 35mm SLRs and I found Fuji 35mm film to be better than Kodak.
Back in the 1940's Kodak was offered the patents and development of the copy machine, but turned it down, hard to believe in how the copy machine would have been right up their proverbial alley. But they saw no market for it. This is how Xerox corporation came to be. Can you imagine in how the copy machine would have saved Kodak today
They should have covered this in the video, but they missed it. I’m glad you pointed this out.
Interesting that even though Kodak passed on copier technology, the innovation stayed in Rochester with Xerox.
Speaking of Xerox, they fumbled bringing the personal computer to market.
@@redcomic619They fumbled majorly. Although up to present day, the UI design paradigm on personal computers was inspired by research at the then renowned PARC in Palo Alto.
XEROX - another great example of stodgy thinking and missed opportunity. They invented the mouse/icon graphic interface and did absolutely nothing with it, which is why Bill Gates is a billionaire today.
Imagine discovering you’ve created a technology that is going to put you out of business. You have billions invested in (and make billions) in film and film processing and here’s something that makes all of that unnecessary. Honestly, I don’t think Kodak stood a chance.
If they invented digital camera earlier it would only accelerate their decline. They did carve a space in digital camera but that entire market imploded. So no matter what they would not survive.
Companies pivot all the time. It just takes strong leadership and vision. Fuji did it, Nokia did it, even look at a company like Microsoft who transitioned from desktop software to cloud.
@@RyanMcCarvillRight. Kodak could have made a smart phone. Or, they could have made cameras for smart phones. Seeing the camera is such a big selling point for smart phones. Imagine the iPhone having a "Kodak camera" of the latest and greatest.
@@LynxStarAuto their biggest asset was their patent portfolio which they could have used to pivot to any number of imaging use cases with a bit of a moat around them, yet they sold the patents for a fraction of what they were valued at just to keep the legacy business going for a bit longer.
Rolls Royce produced the best piston engines. Now they produce the best jet engines. If You're the best, You must be the first who makes the step into the new direction.The alternative is to fail, or to be a hero in some conspiracy theory, like the window glas or the lightbulb companies are
I was born into a Kodak (Recordak) family. We moved to Rochester in 1967 and my dad died two years later of cancer. His office mates came and painted our house! My first camera was a Brownie, my first digital was a Kodak...but they missed the boat as they clung to the consumer film market. Sad.
That's not what happened. Smart phones killed Kodak not digital.
Kodak was popular during my childhood. Them days I would peddle my bike for miles and always pass a Kodak booth were people turned their film in to be developed. It was expensive for a lot of families. Digital cameras forever ended that nightmare.
It was crazy exspensive. Was really fun paying for bad pictures. And if any had a shred of light on them, you had to buy them.
As soon as you could take digital photos without having to buy FILM and having to pay to get the rolls developed, that was the end of Kodak, they adopted the technology too late.
I well remember what a PITA it was having to buy rolls of 36 exp film, shoot the roll, and pay to have it developed and wait a week to get prints back, and many times some frames didnt come out, or in some cases the roll didnt advance because it's track didn't engage right.
I was so glad when you could take unlimited digital photos and see them instantly!
You just pretty much summed up this entire video - without the video's overly dramatic endless blabbing & annoying sing-song narration. They took forever to make just a few points.
Another thing I'd add to your comment is - how quickly the quality of digital photos improved - to the point that digital photos usually looked better for everyday needs than film pics, esp. bc almost no one enlarged or even printed the pics they took on their phones.
the quality of digital still sucks.
-sincerely, photographer of 40+ years.
And why consumer level film scanners disappeared so quick. Keeping dust out of those film scanners was a nightmare.
I proudly worked at the Eastman Kodak Fair Lawn Laboratory in NJ during the eighties. My life has been a Kodak moment.
Excellent documentary! You got a new subscriber.
We had shoeboxes of old pictures to go through! What will our kids and grandkids have? A SD card they can’t read? An old phone they can’t charge? Or will we keep up with that cloud subscription in 50 years?
Nobody cares about you after 3 generations
You can still have shoeboxes of old pictures...buy a decent photoprinter. They're cheap. And they're not some creepy guy at the drugstore developing everyone's photos.
I had tons of photos that I took for over 30 years. mostly taken with Kodak film and/or a Kodak camera. I gave my photos to a family member for safekeeping and now they are gone. Not sure whatever happened to the photos and didn't want to ask. The end result is that all those fond memories from the photos that I took, are now only in my mind. Physical photos are great but many things can happen to them.
It’s simplistic to say Kodak would have been saved if it had switched to digital photography. If Kodak had gone heavily into digital they would have either only delayed their demise by a few years, until mobile phone cameras took over, or they would have had to become a phone manufacturer. To do the latter they would also have had to develop further innovation by way of email and app solutions. An overwhelming development challenge. Their only real option would have been a merger or cooperation with a computer or phone manufacturer and even that stood a high chance of ending badly. They stuck to what they did best but the market disappeared. Their entire business model was based on film and processing - the cameras were only ever a small part of the overall enterprise. It’s a bit like the situation faced by saddle makers when the car took off - the market retracted by 95% very quickly and their expertise did not transfer to anything else. They were left to service a small specialist market, rather like photographic film makers are now.
One thing that nobody banked on , was how quickly the digital medium would develop. In the early 2000's it was thought that it would take 20 years for digital to match film guality.
Who thought that? Kodak had a digital camera in the 70's.
I still think film, especially black and white have a drama that can’t be matched. Digital doesn’t seem to fully capture the atmosphere of the photo.
in 1985 I graduated with a degree in electronics. We had been given major assignments on digital imaging, as at that time Japanese manufacturers were pouring millions into developing digital cameras, it was widely known in the electronics industry that they would be mass-marketing digital cameras within a few years.
In 2002 I had a Japanese digital camera at work, which I used to take pictures of work projects. It was only 640 x 480 resolution though.
Not exactly, I was a digital imaging consultant at Kodak in 1992. Kodak was told they had 10 years. Executives didn't care. Go read Innovators Dilema.
as a pro of 40 plus years, i assure you digital hasn’t yet touched the quality of film. so they were correct.
The bean-counters always take over after pioneering engineers invent something new. They immediately fire the pioneers and ride that new thing into the ground.
- Boeing
- Blockbuster
- Remington
- All legacy launch companies
- The list goes on
We’re seeing the exact same thing happening in the automotive industry right now…certain manufacturers are completely failing to see and acknowledge a revolutionary change coming to the automobile industry
Executives are supposed to be visionary, strategic, focused on long-term successes. Many are just underwhelming employees that know how to do little more than put their energies into maneuvering the next promotion.
Also to see if they can sack more workers and beat their last number.
Haven't we all seen incompetent people promoted to keep them from screwing up a situation any worse? Happens in government all the time.
The Peter Principle. People rise to their level of incompetence.
US CEOs are only interested in share price as that’s where most of there earnings come from, so milk cash cows and don’t invest at all.
My wife and I are Realtors. I was a really early adopter of Digital and Photoshop. Seeing all the benefits, cost and time saving it provided. It will be interesting to see how AI will shake everything up. Good and bad?
People out of work. Soylent Green is the next phase.
I worked for them in mid 00's as their IT was partially outsourced. It was such a strange place. All inside was run still like it was the 80s. The old, wooden furniture, the sandwich man coming daily, the old school work culture, the lotus notes they used, while everyone else was on outlook. It all felt like it has been frozen in time. Later on they had security checking every car going in and out, as you would drive up to your building, the area in north London was massive, by then they dismantled a lot of buildings, just empty lots. But the security was tight, all booths checked, looking for people stealing whatever where was left I guess. I didn't enjoy the atmosphere there, not because of the people but because of how ancient and dead it felt. A skeleton of what it was, and you could feel that their IT was there left to support the small remaining team and int users.
The first person to take digital pictures was a Kodak engineer. When he offered his invention to the Kodak management he was simply brushed off with the words "We are a chemical company!"
Sic transit gloria mundi!
Kodak’s failure is a great lesson for big companies like Apple or Microsoft or Google.
And all of us, when the pols want to bail them out with public money
And it appears they are learning.
Microsoft, Google and Apple are pretty nimble.
Gates turned Microsoft around focusing on the Internet. Unfairly? maligned Balmar laid the groundwork for Azure cloud services. Nadella seems to be pushing the company to new highs via AI.
Learning what? Putting creepy (even more than the baseline) invasive ai bs in there devices ,
Building data centers that use up huge electricity amounts ,the existing for cloud storage, in the near future for ai systems , big data will kill probably the climate
Kodak was like Xerox and perhaps a ton of other entities that didn't stir in the right direction. They were kings in their product lines. For any entity to invest/gamble a substantial portion of their wealth into an unproven unknowns is mesmerizing.
Ironically, Xerox is also a Rochester company. Though email came out of an office in california
Great documentary. I find it interesting that a friend of mine worked for Kodaks flight department he told this story almost to the T. He said that near the end they had a big overseas trip to make a business deal that would keep them out of bankruptcy,but it failed. He said that when they were all boarding the plane to go back to New York there was a lot of long faces. He overheard one of the guys say. Well we did the best we could. Within a month the flight depart closed and they filed for bankruptcy. Very few things remain the same. Improvise Adapt Overcome.
I remember Laura Tyson, Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1995 and 2nd Director of the National Economic Council from 1995 to 1996 under President Bill Clinton was a Director of Kodak since 1997. TYSON RESIGNED THE DAY BEFORE KODAK DECLARED BANKRUPTCY. Apparently her job was done after 15 years as a Director.
I’m 46…..grew up with film but quickly embraced the first digital cameras, then DLSR, then life gets crazy with working & kids, so then my iPhone, then my Samsung and now my Google pixel 8 is plenty good enough camera for me. I would argue my age group is at the end of the “Kodak moment” era. I’d guess most people younger than me (millennials) wouldn’t even what that is anymore… maybe they heard their parents say it but they’ve never used it. Whatever generation is after millennials would have no idea what it is! Innovation is so interesting. It is even more interesting to look back on it with a fine tooth comb after we’ve had the new technology for years.
With digital cameras, you don’t need film. It was film, not the camera, that sustained Kodak. So even if Kodak had pioneered digital cameras, their dominance was doomed. The best that Kodak could hope for, was to continue in business, probably much reduced in size and status. Maybe Kodak’s unspoken approach was to squeeze the existing business to get most profit in the here and now.
This reminds me of the Business School leson about Marketing Myopia. What business were the Railroads in? (transportation)
What business should Kodak have realized they were in?
Imaging?
(Imagine if Xerox & Kodak had collaborated on joint ventures in imaging: medical, industrial, commercial & consumer.
Having a Cash Cow in a portfolio with Rising Stars is nice, but ya gotta keep it healthy for it to live, let alone be able to adapt.
Strickland is incorrect at 1:46. "Kodak" did not begin in 1880 and the first Eastman camera was not patented until 1888.
In 1880 Henry Strong and George Eastman became partners to produce Eastman's new dry plate coating mechanism. In 1881 they started the Eastman Dry Plate Co. The word Kodak came about in 1888. In 1889 they incorporated and changed the name to The Eastman Company. 1892 they reincorporated and called the company The Eastman Kodak Co.
Also, Strickland does not acknowledge the inventor of the digital camera at Kodak in Rochester, Steve Sasson and his supervisor at Kodak, Gareth Lloyd. They developed the camera in 1975 and received a patent in 1977. I don't believe they worked for Kodak in Japan.
The digital camera was developed in Rochester.
Kodak didn't at that time didn't have the vision.
They were loosing market share, not acting on their own discovery of new technologies and fell of a cliff.
Unfortunately government regulations pushed Kodak and others out of business.
Four streams of income from one product.
Other comment hasn't posted yet.
@@hawkeyetec Correct...EPA and anti trust law suits helped kill the company. The first anti trust suit lasted twenty years and resulted in the government finally backing off. It still cost the company millions of dollars and bad headlines. The instant photography law suits were the fault of the then corporate leaders at Kodak.
No one at Kodak had the vision or agility to move from film to digital, plus fund the traditional business.
Perhaps the only lasting win is that many pro photographers and movie makers still prefer using the traditional film products invented by Kodak.
Other lasting legacies were the way Eastman and Strong treated employees, providing decent wages and accepting their suggestions to improve conditions.
Offering the government photo intelligence technology during WWI. This help was was initially refused because of the anti trust suit, but later accepted. At the end of WWI George and Henry wrote a check to the US government, equal to all the profit they made from their government contracts. Kodak was also one of the most prolific promoters of war bonds.
@@hawkeyetecKODAK’s lack of vision had nothing at all to do with government regulation. Not every historical development fits into a right wing framing narrative.
Makes we wonder if Kodak had embraced the digital camera, set it in a phone with their own brand they would be where apple is today, and this documentary would be about apple's past history.
That's what I was thinking. Where is the Kodak phone, the Kodak home photo digital printer or the Kodak holographic TV screen?
Floped they had a printing group but dropped it.
They did! Kodak manufactured 100% of Apples digital camera's. Kodak themselves had the #1 selling digital camera in 2005. In 2007 Apple came out with the iPhone. Samsung in 2009. Smart phones hurt Kodak not digital. How are they supposed to magically know cell phones would be a thing.
@@trnlft Kodak was irrelevant by the 2010s, they had mastered the art of digital sensor imaging and color conversion and were leading the way in the 1990s but had relied on Canon and Nikon for their bodies. The camera/lens companies took over in the 2000s and Kodak didn’t develop their own digital lens and mount system the way Fuji did, the only film company that survived the transition to digital.
A great documentary, which surprises you doubly due to its tragic background. It is not the analysis of a company's bankrupcy but of human blindness. Congratulations!
Am seeing this and am thinking about Intel, such an amazing company that just stopped innovating and now its losing market share to the likes of AMD/NVIDIA and TSMC
Intel would be gone by now if not for two things: their Israeli branch came up with the Core processors and immediately revolutionized Intel's whole line. That single thing saved the company. The other thing was how so many buyers only want Intel. They have the mindshare with that base. Even now with the 13th/14th gen disaster, people still insist they will only buy Intel. The rest of the market has rightfully laughed at them and bought AMD or even ARM.
@@LatitudeSkyWasn't AMD in their own hot water ?
I went to RIT and graduated in 1999. I lived about 2 miles down the road from the Eastman house downtown. I remember getting to tour the Kodak factory as a student of photography. Really neat documentary.
I still have an old Sony digital camera I bought in the mid 90s. Its a pocket camera the size of a brick! It cost me silly money to buy but the resolution of the photos was excellent. After that I went through a few Canon SLR's but now have an "ancient" Panasonic TZ10 which is a true compact/pocket camera and light enough to carry around all day. Still takes excellent photos.
Sony has a number of wonderful tiny, pocketable cameras for us. I have some large Sony cameras, but I am looking at the ZV-1 as it can easily fit in my pocket for those times where a camera will not be welcome.
That guy went to work for Kodak in ‘73? That would make him about 75. He looks 50.
This was done more than 10 years ago.
I knew someone that worked for Motorola, was shocked when the boss put his feet up on the desk and said, ok we have done it, own the handphone business.
Brilliant video. For a photo geek an absolute treat.
Imagine saying in a meeting in the early 90.s how about a camara in a phone! And everyone looking at you like an idiot 😂
The technology simply wasn't there at the time.
ok
I think the story of Kodak parallels with other US companies. GM, Bethlehem Steel, and many others died (or are in the process of dying) due to lack of innovation, or worse embracing innovation in panic mode and throwing the entire budget on unproven technology (like elecric vehicles). I worked at Bethlehem Steel when they were the world's second largest corporation. They were too late to acknowledge new steel-making techniques that were better, cost less and produced higher quality steel. The outcome is history. Right now US Steel, Bethlehem's major competitor is in the process of being taken over by Nippon Steel Corp. Innovation/diversification is key to success, long term
I moved to digital as soon as I could afford it. I built up a full Canon DSLR kit, spending far more on the camera upgrade path than I ever did on film. Eventually, I ended up using my phone 95% of the time, and sold my dusty Canon stuff a few years ago, along with my Olympus OM4-t film camera.
If the early 1990s (less than 40 years ago) is ancient history, then I'm beyond ancient.
I remember growing up in Rochester and riding thru the Kodak area. All the parking lots full to the edges with worker's cars. By the time I left Rochester at 22 yrs old, it was starting to thin out. One of my dad's good friends got laid off after 11 years not missing a single day. His wife eventually left him. I think he was trying to get a job that matched Kodak and it just never happened. Very sad. When I went back in 2016, its a ghost town. Just empty lots. Xerox is a shell of itself too. Sad to see.
I miss the pre-digital era.
I still have some Kodak cameras, unfortunately the films now come not from Kodak anymore but from a Chinese company :(
I don't.
@@logicn.reasoning9744 Same
Deming once wrote about being the best and still going under. You could have been the absolute best carburetor manufacturer, but if you didn’t pivot to fuel injectors, you’re done.
Re: “Kodak moments”, nobody calls them that anymore, that’s how far removed from relevancy they are.
Kodak was a pioneer in FILM. They never, ever occupied any presence in the camera market since...well....forever. And they were absolutely doomed when digital photography emerged as the successor to film. Kodak failed because it was doomed to fail because the only thing that received any focus was film. It really is that simple.
The speed of the shift to digital photography and then camera-equipped smartphones was a seminal change. A tough wave to survive.
Working in the offset printing industry for many years, all we used was Kodak film! As the printing industry changed and died so did the need for offset print film all contributing to the decline of Kodak! They should have seen it coming sooner and shifted gears into something more in keeping with the times and the future! Kodak sold off its manufacturing buildings to have the cash to keep paying executives that did nothing to keep the business going…….sad to see what Kodak is today!
You see that all of the time - absolutely ridiculous C-suite salaries and bonuses while the company is spiraling, then they still get a "golden parachute" as the company folds or files for bankruptcy.
I went to photography school in Boston in the mid 70's. I miss the tactile handling of film and the chemicals / dark rooms .. it was a time long lost now .
I was born and still live in upstate NY. General Electric was the big employer in the small city I grew up near (Schenectady). Electricity, light bulbs, appliances, medical imaging, and Giant turbines were made here.T.V. was developed here, too. Like Kodak in Rochester, G.E. lost its prominence, it seems, because they diversified too much and/or stopped taking chances, relying on past success too much. Time moves on, whether you want it to or not. Be ready to do the new or die.
Interesting. I grew up with film but seldom Kodak. I used Agfa for colour and Ilford for black and white. I immediately started using Ilford XP1 when it was introduced. It was magnificent. I could never dream of a Hasselblad though!
I think AOL, Nokia and Ploaroid are other companies that could well be compared with Kodak. Maybe Boeing will join them.
I'm just a consumer and not knowledgeable like the business like many of the other commenters. Still, I have questions based on what I remember growing up. 1) Evidently Polaroid didn't catch on in a large way, but why? Did Kodak feel no threat from a company that produced instant pictures in the 1960's? 2) There was a realization over the years that the earlier color pictures we took were fading. All the pictures were becoming off-color. I believe it was even in the news. Didn't that send people to other film manufacturers en masse? 3) Did Kodak ever venture into the high end camera market? If I were to buy a high end camera (remember, I'm just Joe Consumer, not an expert), I'd never even think of Kodak. I'd go to Canon.
Xerox is another Rochester story of soaring from greatness only to bury your head in the sand when change comes. Unlike Kodak, Xerox invented the future. Networking. Laser printing, the GUI, the work that eventually founded Adobe of Photoshop fame, and more. Xerox had all this stuff but did virtually nothing with it. They invented the future and threw it away. The irony is that Kodak looked at Xerox and began entering the same markets, like production printing. Xerox had a successful product in that market. Kodak came out with one a lot like it. Kodak had little success selling theirs and wound up licensing it out to several other companies to rebrand as their own. They looked at Xerox and wanted a share of the pie but they failed to see how small the pie was. Xerox is nothing but a shadow of what it once was. Kodak copied the wrong company.
Steve Jobs used Xeroxes best ideas from its Parc Place division. Xerox in Rochester was arrogant and didn’t listen to those crazy Californians.
That’s what happens when everybody look alike and belong to the same clubs. Nothing outside of their world matters.
In 2010 my sister brought several disposable cameras to our July 4th bbq and the kids were playing with one. I said “Stop wasting the film!” My 9 year old son responded “What’s film?”
Interestingly News Corp would be a titan had the management not interfered in the running of Myspace when it was vastly more popular than Facebook. It makes one wonder about the scandalous amounts being paid to senior executives.
26:20: The Kyocera VP-210 came out in 1999. It was a phone with a color camera. It is so typical of these kind of academics to not have a clue what they are talking about. Kodak in 2001 would NOT have been the first to put a camera in a phone! 📷☎
Keeping your head stuck in the sand leads to situations like Kodak tunnel vision and not thinking outside the box!
I was on the floor of The Chicago Board Options Exchange in Chicago for decades. I still remember the days when EK was a super busy flyer of a stock. Before that, so was PRD, Poloroid. Ahhh yes, the good old days.
The data and the research was there, the rumours were doing the rounds decades ago. For firms that were flush with money and the ability to hire consultants, there’s no excuse. The brand had the leverage to expand into cameras, printers, chips, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of HP today.
I purchased a Kodak digital camera in 2001. I had an uncle who bought a Kodak digital camera around the same time as well. Kodak had digital cameras in the early 2000s and they were quite good cameras, mine was 3 megapixel which was quite advanced at that time. Using a photo printer (Epson R-800) the shots were as good as film for normal sized photos.
The documentary skipped the Kodak digital cameras such as the one I still own, but haven't used in years.
What the name of the song playing at 43:49?
Cloud Dance by Paul Mottram
Thanks! how would I have figured that out? I tried using the microphone button on my phone to figure it out, but it didn't work even after trying it several times.@@PaleBlueDotCitizen
I think Kodak and Xerox were both based in Rochester, NY, at one point.
I think you’re right
I collect Kodak cameras. I just the way they reflect not only the progress of technology but the aesthetic design of generations.
I also have a huge respect for George Eastman. A giant of his generation. A true humanitarian. Still hard to beat Kodak slide film.
I guess the realization that nothing lasts forever helps to understand the Kodak demise.
Not mentioned is Kodak's Center for Creative Imagining (1991-1994) in Camden, ME. Dedicated to digital photography. It was a world class facility. I was lucky enough to visit around 1992.
Alot of my family is from Rochester, most of them retired from kodak before the fall. Crazy to see what downtown rochester looks like now, compared to the hey day of Kodak
My marketing professor: "Destroy your business model before someone destroys it for you!" I worked for Xerox in the 1990s. Their mistakes are legendary because they gave away technologies like windows OS and the mouse that other companies took and are among the largest companies today.
Stubborn CEO that runs the company --- same with XEROX. The Xerox Alto is a computer system developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the 1970s. It is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers, and its development pioneered many aspects of modern computing. The Xerox Alto is the first computer designed from its inception to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface (GUI), later using the desktop metaphor. ... The first machines were introduced on 1 March 1973, a decade before mass-market GUI machines became available
Michael Dell was an intern at Xerox and now you know why the rest is history!! Yes,that Michael Dell,CEO of Dell Computer.
Love the Kodak Museum!
I grew up saving money to get my pictures printed by Kodak To this day my mother has the yellow envelops full of pictures. I'd definitely buy a product from them again. I'd wouldn't even mind if they sold film again. Revealing film is a magical thing.
It's hilarious that the first consumer digital camera was fumbled from the bumbling hands of Kodak into the far more incompetent hands of 90s Apple, where dreams went to die (Copland, Pippen, Newton, etc.). Apple of the 90s knew NOTHING of innovation.
In my college days, there’s always this question “With digital photography, will film be obsoleted?” People at the time will use the example when colour photograph invented will black & white photography get obsolete? But I didn’t believe that at the time, which is like comparing apple to orange!
I worked for Kodak in field sales in the late 1980s. Kodak was in turmoil.
I always admired Eastman Kodak. George Eastman is a distant cousin. My father had one of those folding cameras that used 620 film. I used it a few times, and for many years I used Kodak film exclusively. I don't think this video provides the full picture. In 1995, when I was working for a NASA research center, we purchased a high quality Kodak digital camera for use on UAV missions. There was nothing like it available retail. While a lot of the facts are true, the narrators have a tendency to over simplify. I have also heard that Kodak's partnership with Creo was what really killed them. I don't know the details, but having worked for Creo I would tend to believe that.
The non-stop background music/noise killed it.
Remove the noise and re-upload.
Documentaries today, running relentless noise in the background - have become tools of physical torture.
History and Education by physical torture - ha ha ha
Exactly... totally impossible to watch....
Shhh🤫... If they did that, UA-cam would copyright it and have it off the platform... They did that with Lucy Worsley's History of Romance in 2015. The copy was perfect but it was removed in 3 years time...
I didn’t even notice it until reading your comment. Thanks.
agreed. i cant stand docutainment.
@@chunellemariavictoriaespan8752 how could they remove dear lucy. thats just not right.
In the UK the head of the digital imaging division proclaimed "I'm the head of digital imaging and I know nothing about digital imaging." Unfortunately the company that I was working for offered him a job as a director after he was made redundant.
Its hard to imagine they never seen digital photography coming
Kodak invented the first digital camera! Steve Sasson invented the world's first self-contained digital camera for Eastman Kodak Co., in 1975, changing the future of photography and transforming an industry. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Sasson was always drawn to exploring electronics.
Anyone that takes a great company like Kodak and drives it into the ground belongs in jail. Just unbelievable how talent, innovation, and resources can be wasted so much. What a disgrace.
In 12:28 there is no film in this camera.
Fuji needs to bring down the costs of their chrome films! Fujichrome film over a decade ago was reasonable but not inexpensive for the hobbiest. Today, that same roll of film costs 5X more ! ! ! From $8.00/roll to about $40.00/roll ! ! !
That's is insane ! ! !
Corruption, greed, power hungry (everyone probably wanted to be top boss) and gross mismanagement, led to the total collapse of such a gigantic company. I still have many of their products, but I won't get any parts for them. 😢
Learned a lot, very informative and seemed fair..
My first digital camera was the Kodak EasyShare. I loved it.
Gives a new meaning to the phrase "kodak moment".
I still have my 3mp Kodak 4800. We used them for guest photography at Epcot in 2000. Great little camera.