Is this ever the end of an era? Steve’s Digicams writes:
Despite the company’s financial difficulties, and analyst recommendations to shut off nonessential parts of the business, this is a headline we didn’t think we’d ever be posting. Kodak – a name that’s been synonymous with cameras as far back as we can remember – is closing the doors on its camera business.
Instead of retail products, Kodak will be focusing on business solutions. You’ll still see Kodak photo kiosks and dry lab stations as well as camera accessories, batteries and printers. They’re also keeping film capture and photo paper in the lineup. Still cameras, digital picture frames and video cameras, on the other hand, are on the way out.
How many of us grew up with Kodak cameras in our hands? To the coming generation Instamatic will be nothing more than an iPhone app. Kodak, clueless for too many years, became an also-ran in the digital age. Thanks for the memories….
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I have 3 Kodak including a 8 mm manual cam , still works.
Kodak is so synonymous with camera in the Philippines where I’m from that the term “Kodakan” is used for photo op.
I once did market research for a couple of divisions of Eastman Kodak, where I learned that it has always been primarily in the paper and chemicals business – the camera was simply the device that created volume in their core products. They turned down Xerox, a Binghamton invention, because it did not have a proprietary paper component and they already had a cumbersome copier system, Verifax, that was proprietary in both paper and chemicals. Remember too Kodacolor slides and the ubiqitous Carousel projector. They did no instrument research, and the digital camera and the computer pulled chemical, film AND paper sales right out from under them. They are now a Business School case history of how navel-gazing can kill a mighty corporate enterprise.
My digital camera is a Kodak. First film camera was too. Back in the 1970s.
The irony is that Kodak’s engineers invented the digital sensor, first used in US spy satellites during the cold war. Just like IBM and the personal computer, Xerox and the invention of the ‘mouse’, Ethernet and computer graphical user interface (GUI) they were mired in their self-invented paradigm to understand what they had in hand nor what the future portended.
A little like BHO and the land he accidentally came to lead.