Movie: "Fujifilm: How did they Survive while Kodak went BANKRUPT?"

[Godfrey]

Never hated Kodak, but their management was certainly pretty full of themselves. They were, at one time, The Business ... if you did photography and didn't deal with Kodak, you didn't go anywhere. Read "A Triumph of Genius", the second half of which documents the Polaroid v Kodak patent lawsuit that ran 19 years and which cost Kodak billions in the end, never mind a good bit of their market cred.

Company Culture-wide, I'd liken Kodak much more to IBM than Apple. IBM was MUCH much bigger than Apple, had every great electrical engineer and programmer on their staff, and created thousands and thousands of patents. Apple was more akin to a high school of bright kids needing adult supervision, but who had a good leader and extraordinary ideals/ideas to follow. IBM was all about stuffy white shirts directing phalanxes of engineers to march on their orders, very reminiscent of how Kodak ended up being in the 1970s-1990s.

I'll have to watch the documentary later. I'm sure it will be interesting.

G

 

[Benjamin Marks]

Not a hater.
More of a mourner.
Loved their products.
And their management may have been stuffy, but where are Agfa, Efke, Foma, Adox etc? All went plunging over the same cliff in record time and we took them there.

We amateurs were always a rounding error in their sales. Advertising and fashion were driving the serious consumption, because clients were paying for the consumables, and the consumables' costs were trivial compared to Linda Evangelista's day rate. So when digital came around, and you could know to a certainty you got the shot, it was a no brainer to make the switch. And we went panting like a herd of lemmings over that cliff along with the pros with breathless enthusiasm. But there was no film executive that saw this coming, even though it is pretty clear in retrospect what happened, as it often is.

 

[Freakscene]

Not a hater.
More of a mourner.
Loved their products.
And their management may have been stuffy, but where are Agfa, Efke, Foma, Adox etc? All went plunging over the same cliff in record time and we took them there.

We amateurs were always a rounding error in their sales. Advertising and fashion were driving the serious consumption, because clients were paying for the consumables, and the consumables' costs were trivial compared to Linda Evangelista's day rate. So when digital came around, and you could know to a certainty you got the shot, it was a no brainer to make the switch. And we went panting like a herd of lemmings over that cliff along with the pros with breathless enthusiasm. But there was no film executive that saw this coming, even though it is pretty clear in retrospect what happened, as it often is.

I also really miss the products. If I could time travel I’d go anytime after Xtol was brought to market but before Neopan F, Neopan 400 and Neopan 1600 were discontinued.

Marty

 

[Godfrey]

Not a hater.
More of a mourner.
Loved their products.
And their management may have been stuffy, but where are Agfa, Efke, Foma, Adox etc? All went plunging over the same cliff in record time and we took them there.

We amateurs were always a rounding error in their sales. Advertising and fashion were driving the serious consumption, because clients were paying for the consumables, and the consumables' costs were trivial compared to Linda Evangelista's day rate. So when digital came around, and you could know to a certainty you got the shot, it was a no brainer to make the switch. And we went panting like a herd of lemmings over that cliff along with the pros with breathless enthusiasm. But there was no film executive that saw this coming, even though it is pretty clear in retrospect what happened, as it often is.

Actually, the largest volume consumer of Kodak film was/still is the motion picture industry, not any of the advertising and fashion, or consumer, markets. Only cinema buys *thousands* of feet of film regularly, continuously, and on a nearly daily basis. EVEN with the rise of digital capture in cinema today.

The mistake on Kodak management's part when it came to digital still cameras, even though they invented the technology, was that they believed sincerely that they had at least fifty years before it would be a market necessity, not understanding that to the various (mostly Japanese) camera manufacturers, it represented a huge opportunity and they would apply all of their engineering and development money into making it a reality on a FAR faster time scale. Those camera manufacturers hated being essentially slaves to what Kodak (and the other film makers) would produce as it represented the biggest constraint on their product designs and market sales. Because for them, the consumer still camera market was The Market, not the 'rounding error' that Kodak deemed it in light of the film and chemistry sold for cinema. Digital capture put the development of photographic technology squarely in their hands, not in the hands of the film and chemistry suppliers.

As I said, I neither loved nor hated Kodak products. They worked well, they were there, and I bought/used them without any issues. You could always rely on the quality and consistency of Kodak film and chemistry. Their management, ... eh? "First up against the wall when the revolution comes..." to quote Douglas Adams. 😉

G

 

[Cascadilla]

Actually, the largest volume consumer of Kodak film was/still is the motion picture industry, not any of the advertising and fashion, or consumer, markets. Only cinema buys *thousands* of feet of film regularly, continuously, and on a nearly daily basis. EVEN with the rise of digital capture in cinema today.

The mistake on Kodak management's part when it came to digital still cameras, even though they invented the technology, was that they believed sincerely that they had at least fifty years before it would be a market necessity, not understanding that to the various (mostly Japanese) camera manufacturers, it represented a huge opportunity and they would apply all of their engineering and development money into making it a reality on a FAR faster time scale. Those camera manufacturers hated being essentially slaves to what Kodak (and the other film makers) would produce as it represented the biggest constraint on their product designs and market sales. Because for them, the consumer still camera market was The Market, not the 'rounding error' that Kodak deemed it in light of the film and chemistry sold for cinema. Digital capture put the development of photographic technology squarely in their hands, not in the hands of the film and chemistry suppliers.

As I said, I neither loved nor hated Kodak products. They worked well, they were there, and I bought/used them without any issues. You could always rely on the quality and consistency of Kodak film and chemistry. Their management, ... eh? "First up against the wall when the revolution comes..." to quote Douglas Adams. 😉

G

I worked as a movie projectionist for a few years in the 1980's, and I can vouch for the volume that the movie business created for Kodak. 35 mm motion picture film travels through cameras and projectors at 90 feet per minute. The average feature film print would weigh 50-60 lbs., and be somewhere in the vicinity of a mile to a mile and a half in length. When the latest Hollywood blockbuster was released on a thousand screens simultaneously, that meant 1000 to 1500 miles of film that Kodak produced and probably sold chemistry for. That market has diminished considerably with the change to digital projection, along with the changes in movie production which is largely digital now.

As for Kodak management, I totally understand why they would want the film gravy train to continue indefinitely. They made an excellent product and produced it very efficiently, so profits were good. Digital was going to be different and undoubtedly more difficult initially, as it proved to be. It would have helped if the first Kodak DSLRs (reworked Nikon and Canon bodies) hadn't been priced so aggressively($25,000), leaving the field open to the camera manufacturers to offer equivalent cameras for a mere $5000 instead for news organizations where the ultimate image quality mattered less than speed. But I think that Kodak bean counters added up how much film they wouldn't sell over a couple of years and added that into the price of the camera. We all know how that worked out...