Kodak dominated mass-market consumer photography for over a century. But it failed to meet the challenge from digital photography and went bankrupt a year ago. How could a company as strong as Kodak fail so badly? This post explains what happened to Kodak. In our next post we’ll explain why it happened in terms of an important risk dynamic we call the “Incumbent’s Dilemma.”
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Tim
this is stupendous
excellent job
Hope all is well
JHOC
Kodak is a classic example of a company wedded to secondary concerns rather than think outside of the box and hedging the business with alternatives.
Kodak had a distorted view of its priorities. What had been primary for them (film) became secondary when a competing technology came along (digital). In our next post, we’ll show how Kodak made that mistake.
Tim,
Great intro. There is a story about a previous CEO of Kodak when they were about to enter China decided to go with a big push for film. This totally failed as the new consumer had no allegiance to film and wanted the best technology which was the evolving digital technology.
For the “Incumbent’s Dilemma” see the history of Carnegie Steel which relentlessly discarded old steel making technology as newer, lower cost technologies became available. A century later, US Steel (its successor) found its margins under pressure as lower cots mini-mills took over the low end market for rebar and structural products (beams and flats).
This is classic Darwinian economics
I’m glad you liked it, Ken. I’ve read that story about China too. It cost Kodak a lot of money just at the time digital was becoming a threat. I’ll talk more about the threat from digital and Kodak’s response in my next post. And it is very similar to the big steel companies’ response to the mini-mills