The Demise of Kodak: Five Reasons

I'm not sure the author did their research, I actually worked for a startup that was purchased by Kodak and eventually became one of the only divisions that was profitable within the company. Kodak did invest in several startups including ours and they did a miserable job of managing them, here is a quick rundown of the issues we had after we were acquired.

1.) No one knew where the company was heading long term. It never seemed like Antonio Perez had a real vision for the startups they purchased. All the management in Rochester knew was that we generated revenue.

2.) Kodak middle management consistently threatened to offshore all of our engineering team jobs when we had disagreements about our product direction. This was how they thought they could control us and it failed miserably, several engineers including myself left soon after we were purchased.

3.) They refused to pay high salaries for excellent developers. Hiring came to a standstill because we couldn't find people to work for the measly 75K that Kodak budgeted for engineering positions, our salaries were grandfathered in but Kodak had hard salary tiers for new hires in certain positions that were completely inflexible.

4.) Every job at Kodak was highly specialized to the point of ridiculous redundancy and spectacular waste. If you were a Java engineer you weren't allowed to write Python, that was the Python engineers job. If you were a sysadmin, you couldn't write code at all, if you were a software engineer you were never allowed to touch any part of the operating system. The team that we had was highly experienced in both software engineering, system automation and maintenance. When we were purchased we all became "Java Engineers" and were never allowed to do anything other than write application layer code. If we needed to add something as simple as a cron we put in a request to a ticketing system and it took a bare minimum of 5 days for the request to be filled. We ended up finding out that the Systems Administrators were actually sitting on tickets so they could spread out their work and look busy and not get canned which leads us to...

5.) Everyone in middle management or anyone who had been there for a long time seemed to be trying to run out the clock so they could earn a pension. They did everything from dragging their feet on tasks to actively thwarting other divisions from being successful so they wouldn't look bad in comparison and get canned.

6.) Incompetence at Kodak was pervasive. Kodak should be a case study in the Peter Principle.

I could go on about this for a long time but you get the point.