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Yup, typical life story of a Successful corporation
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Posted by Reality (more from Reality) on Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:20:06 Share Post by Email
In Reply to: Much more to Kodak than cameras and film, Noel, Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:30:21
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Kodak was especially fortuitous to have found near-monopoly in the high volume consumer film market. None of the other sectors that the company tried could match the profit stream.

Yet, over the decades while the company enjoyed the outstanding success and extraordinarily high profit margin, an entire corporate culture, from shareholders to executives to (dare I say even) engineers and marketing staff developed into "credentialed rent seeking" instead of the entreprenuerial spirit that had launched the company a century earlier. Everyone joined the company with advanced degrees in their fields, yet the real driving force is the "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM; IBM never laid off anyone" creed of the "salariman." (IBM really didn't, until the early 90's recession).

Funny I brought up Kodak as "almost gone" only last Friday (http://www.saabnet.com/tsn/bb/general/index.html?bID=256752) The writings were on the wall for some time. Kodak was a pioneer in digital photography (and numerous new industry sectors related to digital photography) from the very beginning and for most of the 20yr history of digital photography, yet none of the new fields could replace the monopolistic profit stream that the company enjoyed in lab chemical and film. By the time the company decided to refocus on film in the late-2000's as a wind-down operation (after the market failure of the final big effort in 35mm full frame sensor; it was a good sensor but never found a good camera body), it was way too late to matter. The one strategy that could have saved the company, one that I actually suggested at the time, in the mid-1990's, early years of digital photography, was for Kodak to buy Nikon from Mitsubishi when Mitsubishi was in dire straights (double whammy from bad real estate investments and the car/ship making facing intense Korean competition) and secure the Nikon lens system as the basis for future profit margin. Well, the MBA types at the Kodak executive suites were too obsessed with their quarterly reports and dividend payouts to make such a strategic investment. The rest, as they say, is history.

Gotta give the company credit for lasting as long as it did. Polaroid almost rocked their boat in the 70's.


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