Quote:
Originally Posted by rdfry
Kodak was a great company once, they took really good care of their employees too bad they couldn't grasp what the future was.
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Kodak was first to market with digital photography and repeatedly was first to market with higher resolution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS
They were probably about as successful as a maker of digital cameras in the 1990's as they had been as a film camera maker during the 1980's. Then a few long-standing competitors managed to produce slightly better products at slightly lower costs. And then increasingly good camera phones meant that a lot of people didn't even need those.
The problem for Kodak was that cameras are a smaller business than film and developing was, and a business in which there are more good competitors. Kodak grasped the future, as did the competitors. What Kodak couldn't do was replicate in digital cameras the dominant market share they had had in photographic chemicals.
It's unrealistic to think they could lose the biggest part of their business -- chemicals -- without downsizing. And the downsized company could not support the large number of retirees from back when they were bigger. This, and not inability to grasp, is why they are in bankruptcy.
You could say that Fuji did better than Kodak. But a lot of people lost good jobs there as well.