{"id":242,"date":"2015-09-13T09:41:48","date_gmt":"2015-09-13T13:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/kodak-the-fall-of-a-giant\/"},"modified":"2015-09-13T09:42:40","modified_gmt":"2015-09-13T13:42:40","slug":"kodak-the-fall-of-a-giant","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/kodak-the-fall-of-a-giant\/","title":{"rendered":"Kodak: The fall of a giant"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Who doesn\u2019t remember going on vacations and having to pack tons of little film rolls along with your camera? (which, as a kid, I opened and unrolled several times to see how pictures look like in there, ruining them!) Or when you spent a whole day taking pictures, just to realize that you forgot to put a new film on?\u00a0Well, those were the times when Kodak was the king of the photography world, and producing those film rolls was a huge part of their business.<\/p>\n<p>Eastman Kodak Company was founded in New York in 1892 by George Eastman, who created film cameras in 1888. With the slogan &#8220;you press the button, we do the rest&#8221;, he developed a business model where families could buy a simple and non expensive camera and use film rolls to take pictures, which had to be revealed afterwards. This was a huge disruption for the time, transforming photography from a professional activity to something everyone could do at home.<\/p>\n<p>But, as you might know, this photo empire fell with the disruption of digital cameras. Digital cameras gained strength during the 90s, creating a revolution in picture taking. At the beginning Kodak was confident that customers would continue to see a huge value in having printed high resolution images, so they immediate response was to protect they business by holding their ground, using their huge marketing machine. But digital cameras proved that for a massive part of the market, the flexibility that a digital camera delivered, like giving the customer the chance to retake a picture as many times as they want, was much more valuable than what the old film cameras could offer them.<\/p>\n<p>When this market shift was clear and inevitable for Kodak and they decided to release to the market their own digital camera, it was too late. They lost market share at a rapid rate, and, even though they tried for a long time to keep the ship floating, they failed. Unable to beat their competition, and carrying the \u201cstigma\u201d of being associated with the old film photography, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 in 2012.<\/p>\n<p>For sure this is a sad story for Kodak (and its shareholders), and they are clear losers in this new digital era. But, as ironic as can sound, did you know that it was Kodak the one who invented the first digital camera in the 70s?<\/p>\n<p>Steve Sasson, one of the Kodak engineers who invented the first digital camera, disclosed in a NY Times interview the initial management response to his invention: \u201cMy prototype was big as a toaster, but the technical people loved it. But it was filmless photography, so management\u2019s reaction was, \u2018that\u2019s cute \u2014 but don\u2019t tell anyone about it.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<a href=\"#_ftn1\" name=\"_ftnref1\">[1]<\/a> Kodak\u2019s razor and blade business model relied heavily on films sales to be profitable, and management was not willing to put this at risk.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s particular to see that Kodak\u2019s disgrace wasn\u2019t because they missed technological advances. They invented the technology that dug their grave way before their competition, and didn\u2019t do anything to shield from this possible disruption. Management resisted change favoring film sales and didn\u2019t see digital photography as the direction where the world was going to move. I think this makes them even bigger losers.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ftnref1\" name=\"_ftn1\">[1]<\/a> http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/05\/02\/technology\/02kodak.html?pagewanted=1&amp;_r=0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who doesn\u2019t remember going on vacations and having to pack tons of little film rolls along with your camera? (which, as a kid, I opened and unrolled several times to see how pictures look like in there, ruining them!) Or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":103,"featured_media":243,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[],"class_list":["post-242","hck-submission","type-hck-submission","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"connected_submission_link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/assignment\/digital-winners-and-losers\/","yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Kodak: The fall of a giant - Digital Innovation and Transformation<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/kodak-the-fall-of-a-giant\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Kodak: The fall of a giant - Digital Innovation and Transformation\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Who doesn\u2019t remember going on vacations and having to pack tons of little film rolls along with your camera? 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