Kodak: the Debacle and the BS

By now, you must have heard that Kodak has filed for bankruptcy. All the noise from the web is that Kodak is a bankrupt company because, although they invented many of the digital technology, they were not nimble enough… Those are mostly people that repeat what everybody else copied from the web. The problem is that these people don't have a “long enough” memory. Kodak's problems started long, long before the digital area.

What The Duck has this great cartoon about “Kodak's death”

Here are the 3 main events that caused “Kodak's death”:

1. 1972, Kodak introduced the 110 film format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/110_film. The 126 format cassette introduced in 1963 was very successful, a square version of the 35mm film in a cassette for easy handling. So Kodak decided to “screw the customers” with the 110 format by charging almost the same the price as the 126 but for a third of the film. The quality of the 3½” by 5” prints was not good (I don't remember 4” by 6” existing.) Customers that bought a 110 camera never bought another one, they usually upgraded to a cheap “point and shoot” film camera.

2. 1982, Kodak introduced the disc format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_film. Kodak charged the same price for that disk as for the 24 exposure 110, but the negative was only a third of the size of the 110 film. The quality of the 3½” by 5” prints was quite bad. Most people didn't buy these cameras, these were mostly presents and the users quickly changed cameras to non-Kodak cameras.

   The processing labs, industrials or 1-hour, didn't like it, they had to buy new processing equipment. Many (I would say the majority) 1-hour photo labs refused to spend the extra $80,000¹ for a new Noritsu² processor.

3. 1982, Kodak said to the world: “We are Kodak, and we are not paying!” The US got their first summer Olympics for 1984 in Los Angeles since 1932. Kodak had been the official “photography sponsor” since the beginning of the sponsorships and had many unofficial deals long before the sponsorships. So a small upstart company got the contract: Fujifilm.

   Kodak was forcing dealers into minimum volumes if the dealers wanted to keep their Kodak license… In 1984, Fujifilm got all the exposure of the very successful Los Angeles Olympics, many dealers dropped their Kodak license and started to sell Fujifilm. Fujifilm had fantastic color film, their B&W films were definitely below par, but only some professionals and camera clubs were buying B&W film by then. Which is why most of the small 1-hour photo labs dropped the Kodak chemicals and paper and switched to Fujifilm.

Everybody, on the business side, “hated” Kodak. Kodak was extremely difficult to deal with. Only the press liked Kodak. Many people were cheering each time Kodak would stumble.

Kodak started “to go down the drain” long before the digital world. By the late 70s, Kodak & Polaroid represented 80+% of the film, paper and chemical, not just US but for the whole world. By the mid-1990s, Polaroid was already moribund and Kodak well below 50% of the world's film, paper and chemicals. That was just the beginning of the small point and shoot digital cameras, the Sony Mavica was just under $1,000. By 1995, Kodak was already 30% smaller than at its peak, the late 70s.