Kodak: The mighty has finally fallen

It, in some form, will probably get back up for a while.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/eastman-kodak-files-for-bankruptcy/


But, as someone who spent way too much time tuning the ideal dilution of D-76 in which to develop my Tri-X, a feel sort of like a dinosaur mourning the suffering of a larger, older, fellow traveler.

 

I have read a few articles saying this was the worst-managed company of the Internet era and maybe of any era. Forget newspapers failing to capitalize on the market; Kodak had "first-mover advantage" in the entire online photo space and did absolutely nothing with it while all the other sites flew past them and traditional retailers like Walgreens and Costco lapped them as well.

 

They were so damn sure that Americans wanted to buy special DVD players and CD-ROMs to view their pictures. They kept trying to push that system of viewing photos for about five years as the industry whisked past them and their film business went extinct.

 

I had a friend who did business with Kodak. He sold them Code-a-phone answering machines by the hundreds. This was years after voice mail was commonly used by other similarly size companies.

 

Those big yellow Kodalith boxes used to be ubiquitous at just about every newspaper.

 

Kodak's bravado in the mid-2000s, saying they were going to re-take the market:

 

The actor from that video is also on Funny or Die as the host and played Chris Dodd in HBO's "Too Big to Fail."

 

My mother bought me one of those EasyShare cameras with the print dock. The camera itself is fine. However, I think I had it less than a year before they decided to discontinue making the paper and the ink for the dock. I guess that was just as well because all that ink (HA!) was good for about three pictures before the ink ran out. But I have to keep the print dock because it also charges the camera battery ... and there's no other way to do it.

 

If you read "Fumbling the Future" you might assign that label to Xerox Corp - - but I cannot argue that Kodak did not adjust to the new times and the new techlologies well at all.

 

A friend of mine was a VP there until he retired recently. He was proud of the fact that a company that had 85 percent of its revenue source (film) become obsolete, still managed to survive in this world.
I'm not disputing anything said above.
I didn't know enough about their stuff to question him about their technology.

 

Tri-X Pan. Whoa. I think my head started swimming a little from the wave of deja vu.

Spent two full summers shooting a roll at a local baseball or softball game each evening, went in and developed it in between taking call-ins, and they'd use my best shot the next day.

 

It's funny (not funny Ha Ha) because earlier this week I was looking an a paper from Feb. 1987 and the stock report caught my eye. Eastman Kodak was trading at $75.75. I called up the current price, and it was 57 cents. That was Tuesday maybe. Ouch.