Skip to main content

Kodak: another one bites the dust

Kodak has filed for Chapter 11. Not particularly surprising, but kind of sad. Here is a great article on why Kodak failed to which I want to add an anecdote.

In early 2001 I visited Australia and on the trip back (I think) I talked to a person moving out of Australia that had been a manager at a Kodak shop. By the 2001, developing of film had changed. It was all about scanning and digitalizing. Having just been in Japan I'd see that Fuji was all over scanning. So I wondered what Kodak was doing about that. And the woman told me nothing. She said that for years they'd been complaining to the central office about how expensive their development process was and that it wasn't even tied to digitalization. Their response was that "it's Kodak so people will pay more." Even then it was clear that developing was changing and Kodak was not being visionary about that. Unsurprisingly Kodak stores closed through out Australia. If they weren't listening to their managers on the ground it's not surprising that they'd be caught with their pants down.

Ten years latter, I have a great lil' old Kodak 5 megapixel 2005 camera which is fantastic for hiking but which I had to buy after returning a newer model. I had to down grade because the newer models were crap. If you have few digital cameras they have to be solid. How do you go from solid to crap? Someone there wasn't paying attention. Same as with the Australian stores. My little camera came with a dock for a Kodak printer, which no one bought.

I see Kodak pass with a bit with nostalgia, mostly because I was trained as a Film Camera guy and liked the feel of film and spent many a day changing and packaging rolls of film for movies, music videos and the like. But at the same time, when I was looking into buying a Kodak printer a few years ago, I asked about a Linux Driver (HP printers have Linux drivers btw) and the response I got was so nasty that I went ahead and bought a Canon printer. Kodak's demise is of their own making.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Fake Resume

Inspired by the over aggrandized bio of Joseph Rakofsky I want to write my own. If you don't know who he is; Joseph Rakofsky is a lawyer who earned a mistrial for a criminal client due to his (alleged) incompetence as reported on the Washington Post . There has been quite a few commentaries on his "Streisand-house" approach of suing all the bloggers and even the Washington Post and American Bar Association for reporting his (alleged) ineptitude. ("Streisand-house" is what happened to Barbara Streisand who wanted to have a picture of her mansion removed from the internet and she sued to have it removed. Unfortunately suing requires the filing of public documents with a picture of her house. The lawsuit had the direct opposite effect it intended. Everybody now could see legally, since it was a public document, a picture of her house.) But all that internet gossip aside I'm most impressed by his resume. Here is a quote from the website: Prior t...

Setting JRuby to run in 1.9.2 mode by default

JRuby comes with both 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 (currently) and the default is 1.8.7. If you want to change it you have to feed an option at the command line: $jruby --1.9 This weekend I had to migrate a rails program that I hadn't written and the author used 1.9.2 notation so it would not run on JRuby with the default settings. So I had to add the version option with every command which gets old quick. I looked online for a way to make this automatic (and on my JRuby books) but could only found the way to do it on a Mac or Linux but all Windows references just mentioned nebulous concepts such as environmental variables and seemed to be different from which version of Windows you are using. Here is how to do it. Windows 7: Got to Control Panel, System. Wine (Crossover 10): Java 6 version 21 will run on Wine (at least on Crossover 10) and you can install JRuby on top of that. To set environmental variables you have to go to regedit and set it there manually. Follow th...

Coca-confusion, it comes and goes...

Recently Latin American countries have voiced their opposition to prop 19 (it would legalize recreational marijuana use) because it will cause confusion. This is hogwash. While it might be a little curious to a Columbian that he can go to jail for growing pot while a Californian will not; it's no more confusing than a Bolivian growing coca legally and a Californian not. Wasn't Evo Morales a coca grower? Legalizing Marijuana if anything will lead to less confusion not more.