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Kodak was well aware of what was going to happen. Company culture killed digital photography.

I was at Apple when we worked with engineers from Kodak who were working to change various format standards to allow digital photos. This was in the late 1980s or early 1990s.




But, from the perspective of today, Kodak would have had to basically eclipsed Apple.

Even displacing the big Japanese camera manufacturers, who by then had dominated high-end photography, would have required reversing decades of a shift away from high-end cameras like the Retina line.

I don't doubt there was company DNA against digital photography but it's not like non-smartphone photography, especially beyond relatively niche pro/prosumer level, has had such a good run recently either.


There is still a lot of business opportunity in supplying image sensors and lenses to smartphones.


But it is nowhere near as profitable as the 35mm film system was.


The 35mm system was a huge consumables business down through the food chain. That basically doesn't exist with digital. (Aside from ink jet supplies and I'm not sure how true even that is any longer.)




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