The story of Kodak has been played out many times over the past 100 years - where the major player in a particular market fails to realise the technology is shifting radically, and fails to adapt through its own inertia, then withers away and dies as those better able to exploit the new technology leapfrog them.
The underlying problem is that an old company reaping the rewards from dominating a mature technology loses the ability to innovate quickly, tends to look to the past instead of l
ooking at how best to take advantage of what a new technology could do.
20 years ago Kodak knew film would be dead and CCD/CMS sensors were the future, but their attempts to make the transition can only be described as half-hearted:
- some good sensors early on, but then nothing,
- a heavily modified Nikon body for pro's, then nothing,
- big fat heavy and clunky "compacts" early in the history of compacts which were crippled with rather poorly spec'd lenses from Schneider Kreuznach (focal ratio too slow, too little zoom) and poorly thought-out user interface;
- failure to grasp the opportunities to mass-manufacture in China to push price down.
Then there is the question of what to do with images once we don't make prints nor use slide projectors - remember Kodak used to dominate the projection market too, but they died off in the 1980's. It's obvious the new medium for displaying images had to be digital, but what did Kodak do for the past 20 years ? Persuade people to put images onto CD's and print them, instead of making fondleslabs and digital picture frames - which could have been done 10 years ago.
Worst of all IMHO is that they failed to realise they should have set out to lead a particular aspect of the technology (such as sensors) and form a partnership with a mature, established big-name camera manufacturer also looking for a sensor, electronics and mass-manufacturing skills (such as Panasonic did with Leica, or Sony and Zeiss).
There were a few other big names dying slowly with the death of SLR's in the 1990's such as Yashica, Contax and Voigtlander but Kodak never realised they should have teamed up with a decent camera manufacturer. There was a time when even Pentax may have done a deal (Pentax was very late to go digital). Instead Kodak tried to do the whole widget except for the lenses from Schneider Kreuznach, known only for a few wide-angle lenses for plate cameras and enlarger lenses. The result was predictable long ago.
Speaking of Pentax, I reckon they're finished, too; though the name will be bought and linger on for a while as a badge on plastic junk cameras.
IMHO the same will happen to Microsoft one day when a killer change happens in computing, and finally IT departments realise they don't need Windows anymore. Innovation is not a strong point at Microsoft.
