Hacker News Reader

Comment by onceUponADime | Hacker News Reader

There are some companys who manage it though, by basically getting bi-furicated intwo two seperat internal divisions competing against one another.

Basically if you have a safe seat- or monopoly, you must learn to play catch against yourself or else.. boing, and important parts go flying.

View on HN

> There are some companys who manage it though, by basically getting bi-furicated intwo two seperat internal divisions competing against one another.

Sometimes that competing becomes backstabbing between the divisions.

And then the company falls apart when you get a real competitor and the divisions are too busy attacking each other.

And Nokia was one such company, in the latter days of S60 smartphones. One (of many) re-orgs produced three main phone divisions called something like: entertainment, executive, and enterprise, with high-level features partitioned between them [1]. So "entertainment" gets the high-quality auto-focus camera because that's great for blogging hipsters, and "executive" gets the barcode reading software so suits can scan the QR codes on business cards [2] ... except they couldn't because without a decent auto-focus camera the QR code needed to be printed on A3 paper and stuck on the wall to be scanable. Yes, this was discovered in internal testing. Yes, it shipped anyway.

Down in the trenches we made bitter jokes about "three bald men fighting over a comb" as we watched our Lords and Masters engage with the looming competition by making snide public remarks about "that fruit company", having long before killed the touchscreen prototypes. But at least Boeing would have handled this situation differently: we'd have been fired for those jokes.

[1] and what if you're an "executive" working in an "enterprise" who likes to kick back with some "entertainment" on the commute? KA-CHING! you're gonna buy three Nokia phones! Or zero, more likely.

[2] that was seriously advanced as a leading use case. Quite probably by an in-house futurist.

This is a great idea. Can we think of any examples where this has worked? Famously, it didn't work at Kodak when they invented digital photography.

Kodak gets picked on unfairly I think. When you look at the revenue streams before digital photography took off, you can see that Kodak had their fingers in every part of it - cameras, film, processing, printing. They made money every time you took a picture. There's simply no revenue stream in digital that's big enough to replace that. It's impossible to shrink a company by 90% gracefully.

I guess they could have just invented Instagram or something

That would have been interesting, but they still would have needed to figure out how to monetize it.

Kodak may have been boned no matter what, but it's still not the example I seek, of a firm that successfully "played catch against itself".

I was just pointing out that there were reasons it wasn't successful beyond just not being a viable approach.

Eastman, which was spun out of Kodak in 1994, is doing quite well. Demand for resins, plastic sheets and intermediates to make plastics products hasn't dropped. Kodak had no idea what their core product was going to be, and bulk chemicals would have been a good bet.

Interestingly, Fuji managed to pivot into polarized films for LCD panels when faced with the same problem. https://petapixel.com/2018/10/19/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com