On the contrary, Kodak was well placed to do well by anticipating 'Moore's Law' as pertinent to sensor pixel density and sensitivity versus film. Film resolution was towards the end of intense development in pixel terms - not much further to go. They had pioneering patents and ongoing R&D would have enabled a long period of dominance during the transition and to this day!!
The board and scientists were asleep on a mountain of cash, and they sold their future for a few crumbs left for shareholders after bankruptcy.
Blackberry did much the same with fewer excuses.
I met with some board members of Kodak in the 80's and they were like old English gentlemen - long on pomp and procedure, but they wore blinders and a vision bypass - TRIH.
Kodak did fine in the transition to digital. They made some popular compact cameras and tried to make DSLRs. They were wiped out by compact cameras being killed by smartphones. The survivors are the old camera makers like Canon and Nikon that have ecosystems. The other big survivor is Sony, which bought a camera company and makes most of camera sensors.
Fuji is interesting, they weren't that successful in first digital cameras, but now have some interesting mirrorless ones. They still make film.
Kodak was essentially a chemical company at one point. They even spun off an actual chemical company. Kodak could probably have played a better hand even if they did probably before their time things like PhotoCD. But they could have been Apple or maybe Instagram? That's a stretch.
I'm not a particular Kodak apologist but suggesting that a company should have been able to anticipate and correct for their business collapsing by 90% in a decade or so seems to need a lot of particulars.
And Sony has certainly had rough patches too. And that's for a company coming from an electronics manufacturer angle.
Kodak could have spun off a consumer electronics or semiconductor manufacturing company. But it's not clear why that is actually a better model than someone else just spinning up similar entities.
I don't need all the chemical engineers and a lot of other people connected with the old business anyway. And I'm sure not turning them into semiconductor experts.
So you're one of the 10% of employees in HR who snuck through to the other side. Is that really a big deal?
That's right. The chief executives and the HR lady basically get transferred over to a new startup funded with Kodak's money and everyone else is fired.
