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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Having worked longtime for a minicomputer company--which actually survived longer than most mostly because of some storage innovations along with some high-end Unix initiatives--it's really hard. You can't really kick a huge existing business to the curb. Or otherwise say we're going to largely start over.

Kodak was not actually in a position to be big in digital. And, of course, the digital camera manufacturers mostly got eclipsed by smartphones anyway a decade or so later.

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On the contrary, Kodak was well placed to do well by anticipating 'Moore's Law' as pertinent to sensor pixel density and sensitivity versus film. Film resolution was towards the end of intense development in pixel terms - not much further to go. They had pioneering patents and ongoing R&D would have enabled a long period of dominance during the transition and to this day!! The board and scientists were asleep on a mountain of cash, and they sold their future for a few crumbs left for shareholders after bankruptcy. Blackberry did much the same with fewer excuses. I met with some board members of Kodak in the 80's and they were like old English gentlemen - long on pomp and procedure, but they wore blinders and a vision bypass - TRIH.

Kodak was essentially a chemical company at one point. They even spun off an actual chemical company. Kodak could probably have played a better hand even if they did probably before their time things like PhotoCD. But they could have been Apple or maybe Instagram? That's a stretch.

I'm not a particular Kodak apologist but suggesting that a company should have been able to anticipate and correct for their business collapsing by 90% in a decade or so seems to need a lot of particulars.

> But they could have been Apple? That's a stretch.

They could have been a Sony. The iPhone camera sensor is made by Sony.

And Sony has certainly had rough patches too. And that's for a company coming from an electronics manufacturer angle.

Kodak could have spun off a consumer electronics or semiconductor manufacturing company. But it's not clear why that is actually a better model than someone else just spinning up similar entities.

I don't need all the chemical engineers and a lot of other people connected with the old business anyway. And I'm sure not turning them into semiconductor experts.

So you're one of the 10% of employees in HR who snuck through to the other side. Is that really a big deal?

That's right. The chief executives and the HR lady basically get transferred over to a new startup funded with Kodak's money and everyone else is fired.

Kodak did fine in the transition to digital. They made some popular compact cameras and tried to make DSLRs. They were wiped out by compact cameras being killed by smartphones. The survivors are the old camera makers like Canon and Nikon that have ecosystems. The other big survivor is Sony, which bought a camera company and makes most of camera sensors.

Fuji is interesting, they weren't that successful in first digital cameras, but now have some interesting mirrorless ones. They still make film.

Fujifilm is a much smaller company than Kodak was. They also applied a lot of their expertise in emulsions to medical applications.

And, yes, they have some interesting if somewhat niche cameras.

Kodak was well aware of what was going to happen. Company culture killed digital photography.

I was at Apple when we worked with engineers from Kodak who were working to change various format standards to allow digital photos. This was in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

But, from the perspective of today, Kodak would have had to basically eclipsed Apple.

Even displacing the big Japanese camera manufacturers, who by then had dominated high-end photography, would have required reversing decades of a shift away from high-end cameras like the Retina line.

I don't doubt there was company DNA against digital photography but it's not like non-smartphone photography, especially beyond relatively niche pro/prosumer level, has had such a good run recently either.

There is still a lot of business opportunity in supplying image sensors and lenses to smartphones.

But it is nowhere near as profitable as the 35mm film system was.

The 35mm system was a huge consumables business down through the food chain. That basically doesn't exist with digital. (Aside from ink jet supplies and I'm not sure how true even that is any longer.)

Data General?

Yes. CLARiiON eventually enabled a sale to EMC (which arguably saved EMC for a time) and the Unix business (especially NUMA servers) were sufficient revenue producers for a while to keep the lights on. ThinLiiNe (or whatever the capitalization was) never went anywhere but neither did a lot of things in the dot.com era.

I knew it :) thanks for confirming! And for sharing.

I was the PM for a bunch of the minicomputers from the mid-80s on. Then I was PM for the initial Unix AViiONs and later the NUMA servers including being one of the main liaisons with CLARiiON.

Seems like Sun really shot itself in the foot by not buying DataGeneral. A Unix storage business that fits pretty well with their larger datacenter portfolio. And a start to a real x86 business.

I just finished reading 'LIFE UNDER THE SUN: My 20-Year Journey at Sun Microsystems' that talks about Sun and the storage businesses a bit. Sun was never happy with how well they did in storage. Sun was part of defining Fibre Channel.

For some reason that still doesn't make sense to they bought StorageTek for an incredible $4 billion at the time when Sun wasn't exactly flying high. The explanation from the CEO given in the book mentioned above is baffling.

Edit:

Seems they bought:

1999: MAXSTRAT Corporation, a company in Milpitas, California selling Fibre Channel storage servers.

Never heard of them. Not sure how comparable it was.

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