my take on Kodak downfall
 

On Mon, 10 Feb 2014, Paul Ciszek wrote:


In article ,
nospam wrote:
In article , Dale
wrote:

having worked there

consumer film was where the big money was

the key is the word *was*.

although kodak pioneered digital photography, they completely failed to
manage the transition to digital and went bankrupt.

The second mouse gets the cheese.

Sometimes the third or fourth.

But that's a good analogy, the computer mouse didn't take off till the
Macintosh in 1984, when it had been demonstrated in 1968 (so it had to
exist before that) and work done on it at PARC.

Michael

my take on Kodak downfall
 

On 02/10/2014 01:13 PM, Martin Brown wrote:
the raw Bayer array

should never be used, an XYZ related array should be used


--
Dale

my take on Kodak downfall
 

In article , Dale
wrote:

the raw Bayer array

should never be used, an XYZ related array should be used

what is an xyz related array??

bayer is the best solution that exists today and will be for the
foreseeable future.

foveon's layered approach has been a disaster.

my take on Kodak downfall
 

On 10/02/2014 19:13, Dale wrote:
On 02/10/2014 01:13 PM, Martin Brown wrote:
the raw Bayer array

should never be used, an XYZ related array should be used

The raw data is what you actually measured at each sensor site - there
is *nothing* more fundamental than that. You are showing your ignorance.

We can conclude that the reason Kodak failed was because they were daft
enough to employ people like you and the other ****wits in marketing
that managed to launch products almost simultaneously with names that
were anagrams, homophones or synonyms of each other.

Kodak at one time had world leading digital technology but chose to
squander their advantage to milk the analogue film cash cow until dry.
They succeeded but the cash cow died as a direct result.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

my take on Kodak downfall
 

On 10/02/2014 18:36, nospam wrote:
In article , Martin Brown
wrote:

A bit like the later Kodak launch confusing professional grade PhotoCD
scanning .PCD with the newer poxy consumer grade PictureCD with the same
acronym. You only got caught out once and went and bought your own
scanner. Shame as PhotoCD was a very good service until they ruined it,
but you could not afford to take the chance of getting a disk with toy
low quality consumer grade scans half the time.

photocd was doomed from the start. it was proprietary and kodak was
restrictive on licensing it. few companies supported it and never
gained traction.

At the time it was very good if you needed existing material digitised.

plus, nobody wanted to buy a special player to watch
photos on a tv.

I agree. That TV player part was dead in the water. The PCD file format
and the archive quality of the media was for its time very innovative.

I suspect that without the train wreck that was PictureCD the
professional scanning service would have made it at least in the UK. The
technical quality was excellent and painless until they started randomly
returning crappy PictureCDs when you needed PhotoCDs.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

my take on Kodak downfall
 

In article , Martin Brown
wrote:

A bit like the later Kodak launch confusing professional grade PhotoCD
scanning .PCD with the newer poxy consumer grade PictureCD with the same
acronym. You only got caught out once and went and bought your own
scanner. Shame as PhotoCD was a very good service until they ruined it,
but you could not afford to take the chance of getting a disk with toy
low quality consumer grade scans half the time.

photocd was doomed from the start. it was proprietary and kodak was
restrictive on licensing it. few companies supported it and never
gained traction.

At the time it was very good if you needed existing material digitised.

plus, nobody wanted to buy a special player to watch
photos on a tv.

I agree. That TV player part was dead in the water. The PCD file format
and the archive quality of the media was for its time very innovative.

I suspect that without the train wreck that was PictureCD the
professional scanning service would have made it at least in the UK. The
technical quality was excellent and painless until they started randomly
returning crappy PictureCDs when you needed PhotoCDs.

photocd might have been innovative for the time but it was poorly
designed and poorly marketed and quickly obsoleted.

the clueless management had no idea what to do with it.

my take on Kodak downfall
 

On 2014.02.10, 00:28 , Dale wrote:
having worked there

consumer film was where the big money was

IMO they should have broken up the company into oldco (Kodak) and newco
(DigKo). Use oldco to milk the brand in film, paper, chemicals and
related products and the newco, completely divorced from oldco, to
invest cash (from oldco and IPO) into new digital oriented imaging.
Eventually oldco would quietly wind down while newco developed new
markets without brand confusion.

That later bit could include new sensors, camera systems, printers,
inks, paper, processing, etc.

Instead they took an approach that underserved the milkable market
(FujiFilm have soaked that up by diligently serving it) and failed to
leverage their R&D in digital markets.

--
Those who have reduced our privacy, whether they are state
or commercial actors, prefer that we do not reduce theirs.
- Jaron Lanier, Scientific American, 2013.11.

my take on Kodak downfall
 

On 02/10/2014 01:36 PM, nospam wrote:
yep. kodak pioneered digital photography and knew it one day would
replace film, but management didn't want to do anything to impact the
revenue from film. very stupid.

for the record I worked in R&D as a systems engineer

it really wasn't the money, it was the people

Rochester's nickname is "smug-town"

existing connection circles prevailed over performance and even
organizational responsibility

there were all kinds of groups vying too do the new stuff

film had the money, film people got the careers

remember this is entertainment technology careers for the most part and
entertaining work as opposed to necessity work, fun prevailed too

the last job I had was hybrid systems integration on the film side

we couldn't have the word integration in the name of our group, since
there was an equipment group was responsible for integration,, but we
got the budgets and careers, while the equipment people had "jobs" doing
not much

if it weren't an entertainment business that didn't really matter too
much, in much cases, the money and performance would have prevailed

there is your business case study

this was a publicly held company, public means socialism whether you
think so or not, and the public suffered, there needs to be better law
for socialized business

private companies can set pecking orders however you want

socialized companies have a trust, and pecking orders other than by
performance should be called anti-trust, in fact I can't think of any
other anti-trust that is worse

--
Dale

my take on Kodak downfall
 

In article , Dale
wrote:

film had the money, film people got the careers

which is why they went bankrupt.

they knew digital was going to replace film, but they refused to let go
of the film business.

had they invested in digital, like their competitors did, they'd still
be a player.

my take on Kodak downfall
 

On 02/10/2014 05:52 PM, Dale wrote:

there is your business case study

want some verification?

they tried George Fisher from Motorola as CEO with a BIG pay to shake
things up, he left

they tried Dan Carp from equipment side to shake up film probably, I
don't know where he went

might want to hear what these two have to say about their experience

--
Dale