“Share of moments. Share life.” What a familiar slogan it is. However, it may leave all the time. As the ex-leader of imaging product and related services, Kodak experiences twists and turns. On January 1, 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection after receiving delisting warning from the NYSE for 16 days.
Kodak was established in George Eastman since 1988, and passed 130 years now. In 1883, George Eastman invented film which undoubtedly brings evolutionary changes to the world. Then in 1888, Kodak launched the camera. Thus, George Eastman laid the foundation of making photography popular. Undoubtedly, Kodak was already the leader in this industry at this time. Besides, Kodak’s selling network was also extremely successfully – it spread across French, German, Italy and other European countries.
Now that Kodak was so successful, why it went bankrupt? Lots of people think Kodak was killed by digital camera. The reason is very simple – Kodak irrevocably wedded to film manufacturing, but didn’t give up the leader location in film industry. However, the digital camera thoroughly abandons the film, and its simple and practical functions facilitate popularizing. Finally, Kodak who didn’t think of progressing was replaced because of reasons above. Was Kodak really like that? Its innovation ability was not weak in fact. At the beginning, Kodak led the world with its evolutionary industry evolution. However, the digital camera which is said to kill Kodak was successfully developed by Kodak in 1975. And the digital image technology was used in aerospace field in the following year. In 1991, Kodak had digital camera with 1.3 million pixels. Now, lots of Kodak’s patent technologies still influence the whole industry.
The reason why Kodak insists on the film industry is a problem ignored by lots of person – the development issue of portable storage devices. For instance, the digital photo with 5 million pixels occupied about 1.2 MB storage space at that time. In nowadays, compared with the disk drive in TB, this size is too little to mention. But it was large enough to make people to collapse at that time, because the first CF memory card just appeared in the world in 1994. It is a great development chance for digital camera, but at that time, memory card had storage space with only several MB which can’t include high-quality digital photo. Moreover, the temporal optical camera technology was pretty mature while digital camera was far behind optical camera both in photo quality and quantity, so Kodak thought digital camera can’t catch up with the developing speed of optical camera in short term and they continued to focus on film manufacturing. However, Kodak had not expected that the developing speed of technology can be so fast. The memory card capability rapidly develops, so the storage space no longer annoys users, and lots of users even complain about its large capacity because they have to partition memory card and manage partitions with partition magic alternative MiniTool Partition Wizard. So, both in photo storing quantity and use costs, digital camera is much better than optical camera. Besides, as the image sensor device CCD and CMOS become mature, the digital photo quality also catches up with the developing speed of optical camera. Although the digital photo is more likely to get lost than common photo, we can easily recover loss photo them with data recovery software MiniTool Power Data Recovery. Since digital data loss problem no longer influence the digital camera development, it is certain that optical camera will be replaced by digital camera. Had Kodak recognized this problem? Kodak finally realized it in 2003. On September 26, 2003, Kodak announced an important strategic transformation: they would give up tradition film business and shift the emphasis to new digital product. However, maybe the transformation was too late, and it didn’t save the declining Kodak. So, in my opinion, the reason why Kodak failed is the wrong prediction on technology developing speed and the hasty coping style. Its failure is inevitable.
Therefore, Kodak teaches us: on the foundation of original industry, we must try our best to devote to the technology development. We would prefer to overrating the technology developing speed rather than falling behind the technology advance. At the same time, we must value every possible developing chance, which is the beneficial development direction of an outstanding enterprise.
Kodak was established in George Eastman since 1988, and passed 130 years now. In 1883, George Eastman invented film which undoubtedly brings evolutionary changes to the world. Then in 1888, Kodak launched the camera. Thus, George Eastman laid the foundation of making photography popular. Undoubtedly, Kodak was already the leader in this industry at this time. Besides, Kodak’s selling network was also extremely successfully – it spread across French, German, Italy and other European countries.
Now that Kodak was so successful, why it went bankrupt? Lots of people think Kodak was killed by digital camera. The reason is very simple – Kodak irrevocably wedded to film manufacturing, but didn’t give up the leader location in film industry. However, the digital camera thoroughly abandons the film, and its simple and practical functions facilitate popularizing. Finally, Kodak who didn’t think of progressing was replaced because of reasons above. Was Kodak really like that? Its innovation ability was not weak in fact. At the beginning, Kodak led the world with its evolutionary industry evolution. However, the digital camera which is said to kill Kodak was successfully developed by Kodak in 1975. And the digital image technology was used in aerospace field in the following year. In 1991, Kodak had digital camera with 1.3 million pixels. Now, lots of Kodak’s patent technologies still influence the whole industry.
The reason why Kodak insists on the film industry is a problem ignored by lots of person – the development issue of portable storage devices. For instance, the digital photo with 5 million pixels occupied about 1.2 MB storage space at that time. In nowadays, compared with the disk drive in TB, this size is too little to mention. But it was large enough to make people to collapse at that time, because the first CF memory card just appeared in the world in 1994. It is a great development chance for digital camera, but at that time, memory card had storage space with only several MB which can’t include high-quality digital photo. Moreover, the temporal optical camera technology was pretty mature while digital camera was far behind optical camera both in photo quality and quantity, so Kodak thought digital camera can’t catch up with the developing speed of optical camera in short term and they continued to focus on film manufacturing. However, Kodak had not expected that the developing speed of technology can be so fast. The memory card capability rapidly develops, so the storage space no longer annoys users, and lots of users even complain about its large capacity because they have to partition memory card and manage partitions with partition magic alternative MiniTool Partition Wizard. So, both in photo storing quantity and use costs, digital camera is much better than optical camera. Besides, as the image sensor device CCD and CMOS become mature, the digital photo quality also catches up with the developing speed of optical camera. Although the digital photo is more likely to get lost than common photo, we can easily recover loss photo them with data recovery software MiniTool Power Data Recovery. Since digital data loss problem no longer influence the digital camera development, it is certain that optical camera will be replaced by digital camera. Had Kodak recognized this problem? Kodak finally realized it in 2003. On September 26, 2003, Kodak announced an important strategic transformation: they would give up tradition film business and shift the emphasis to new digital product. However, maybe the transformation was too late, and it didn’t save the declining Kodak. So, in my opinion, the reason why Kodak failed is the wrong prediction on technology developing speed and the hasty coping style. Its failure is inevitable.
Therefore, Kodak teaches us: on the foundation of original industry, we must try our best to devote to the technology development. We would prefer to overrating the technology developing speed rather than falling behind the technology advance. At the same time, we must value every possible developing chance, which is the beneficial development direction of an outstanding enterprise.
RSS Feed