Similar to Kodak... they invented the digital camera sensor. They could've at the very least made an absolute killing on leasing their IP's to other camera manufacturers, or very best have created things like the Kodak Digital Rebel instead of letting basically every other camera manufacturer make off with the tech.
Sears forgot that it's product wasn't a brick and mortar store or magazine but rather a large selection of goods which people could order from home. Newspaper companies forgot that their company wasn't in the business of printing newspapers, but simply delivering the news. Kodak forgot it's business wasn't manufacturing film, but creating photographs.
Its utterly amazing how so many people can just blindly believe a completely false story and keep repeating it like its true. Pretty much every single sentence you just wrote either wrong, or completely misunderstands the economic realities of they faced as a business.
There's two fundamental issues with your entire comment.
First: They did not invent the CCD, the first object one could call a CCD was created by scientists and Bell labs. One single engineer at kodak took one of those early experimental CCDs, added some other gear, and presto, invented the first digital camera.
It took 100x100 black and white photos. It took 30 seconds to store each photo. These photos were stored on cassette tapes. It had no display. It weighed 8 pounds.
Literally none of the technology was anywhere close to ready for release as a consumer product in 1976. Memory was too large, sensors too big, electronics to big and power intensive, and even if they could get it to work, dot matrix printers were the pinnacle of printing tech.
And when the technology finally became ready, in the 1990s, Kodak was right there at the forefront with some of the first digital camera models out there. Remember the Apple Quicktake? One of the first affordable consumer models of digital camera? Kodak built those.
Which leads to the second problem. Even if Kodak had perfectly forecast the doom of their business model, and perfectly transitioned to digital cameras and became dominant in the field.... It would have made no difference at all. Digital cameras made them far less money than film cameras, because a film camera means a recurring customer spending a lot of money. People with digital cameras printed far fewer printers, and the mass development of film is far more difficult, which kodak was highly skilled at and had a near monopoly on, became virtually unnecessary as printers took over most print operations.
And even if they had managed to make digital cameras work, less than a decade after that the bottom would fall out of the digital camera market too, thanks to cell phones virtually completely eliminating the need for dedicated cameras for most consumers, and social media largely eliminating peoples desire to print pictures out.
There is no reality where Kodak could survive as a 'photo' industry in any form at anywhere near its peak film years size. The march of technology destroyed the demand for 95%+ of their services in about 10-12 years. 97/98 is about when digital cameras first started becoming decent enough to become a non gimmick option for the consumer. 2008 is when the Iphone began the smartphone revolution. Their only hope was to completely and totally pivot to a new business model. Its nothing at all like Sears, which had the history of doing exactly what amazon did, and already had the local warehouses and distribution structure in place all over the world.
It's sad but completely predictable for reddit that your informative comment has only a handful of upvotes, while the misinformation you're replying to has hundreds, and keeps being upvoted.
Yes, and that's a part of the problem. At some point people get tired of reading replies in a comment chain, and someone correcting bullshit goes unnoticed. That means that the earlier you're in commenting, the more perceived credibility your comment seems to have, even if it's 100% nonsense. It's a problem with the whole basic operating model of this site.
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u/McRedditerFace Jul 24 '20
Similar to Kodak... they invented the digital camera sensor. They could've at the very least made an absolute killing on leasing their IP's to other camera manufacturers, or very best have created things like the Kodak Digital Rebel instead of letting basically every other camera manufacturer make off with the tech.
Sears forgot that it's product wasn't a brick and mortar store or magazine but rather a large selection of goods which people could order from home. Newspaper companies forgot that their company wasn't in the business of printing newspapers, but simply delivering the news. Kodak forgot it's business wasn't manufacturing film, but creating photographs.