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As the 2007 Kodak video acknowledges, the story did not change for another decade. Regarded digital photography as the enemy, an evil juggernaut that would kill the chemical-based film and paper business that fueled Kodak’s sales and profits for decades.įisher oversaw the flop of Advantix and was gone by 1999. George Fisher, who was lured from his position as CEO of Motorola to succeed Whitmore in 1993, captured the core issue when he told the New York Times that Kodak
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Whitmore lasted a little more than three years, before the board fired him in 1993.įor more than another decade, a series of new Kodak CEOs would bemoan his predecessor’s failure to transform the organization to digital, declare his own intention to do so, and proceed to fail at the transition, as well. Samper resigned and would demonstrate his grasp of the digital world in later roles as president of Sun Microsystems and then CEO of Cray Research. Whitmore said he would make sure Kodak stayed closer to its core businesses in film and photographic chemicals. As the New York Times reported at the time, Samper had a deep appreciation for digital technology. Whitmore represented the traditional film business, where he had moved up the rank for three decades. The choices came down to Phil Samper and Kay R. In 1989, the Kodak board of directors had a chance to take make a course change when Colby Chandler, the CEO, retired.
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Kodak soon learned that chemically treated photo paper isn’t really all that similar to hormonal agents and cardiovascular drugs, and it sold Sterling in pieces, for about half of the original purchase price. In 1988, Kodak bought Sterling Drug for $5.1B, deciding that it was really a chemical business, with a part of that business being a photography company. Why buy a digital camera and still pay for film and prints? Kodak wrote off almost the entire cost of development.Īs Paul Carroll and I describe in " Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn From The Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years," Kodak also suffered several other significant, self-inflicted wounds in those pivotal years: Yet it still used film and emphasized print because Kodak was in the photo film, chemical and paper business. The Advantix Preview could do that because it was a digital camera. One of the key features of the Advantix system was that it allowed users to preview their shots and indicate how many prints they wanted. The choice to use digital as a prop for the film business culminated in the 1996 introduction of the Advantix Preview film and camera system, which Kodak spent more than $500M to develop and launch. This strategy continued even though, in 1986, Kodak’s research labs developed the first mega-pixel camera, one of the milestones that Barabba’s study had forecasted as a tipping point in terms of the viability of standalone digital photography. Thus he got a close look at the fact that, rather than prepare for the time when digital photography would replace film, as Eastman had with prior disruptive technologies, Kodak choose to use digital to improve the quality of film. In fact, Kodak made exactly the mistake that George Eastman, its founder, avoided twice before, when he gave up a profitable dry-plate business to move to film and when he invested in color film even though it was demonstrably inferior to black and white film (which Kodak dominated).īarabba left Kodak in 1985 but remained close to its senior management. The problem is that, during its 10-year window of opportunity, Kodak did little to prepare for the later disruption. History proved the study’s conclusions to be remarkably accurate, both in the short and long term. All pointed to the conclusion that adoption of digital photography would be minimal and non-threatening for a time. The study’s projections were based on numerous factors, including: the cost of digital photography equipment the quality of images and prints and the interoperability of various components, such as cameras, displays, and printers.