Indeed it did. The writing had been on the wall since the early ‘90s. It may be that Kodak was just too big a ship to turn so suddenly. As it was, their new product pipeline was so long that by the time products went from R&D to the shipping dock, they were obsolete and noncompetitive.
Everyone could see it coming, but they were frozen in the headlights.
One of the odd things to me is that Kodak was one of the earliest players in digital. I have no idea what happened but they somewhere lost their way.
Are they still in business?
“Everyone could see it coming, but they were frozen in the headlights.”
Me too.
Kodak had marvelous inventions in the lab that could have easily saved them, but their management was still living in the 19th Century.
I remember visiting their Rochester lab sometime in the 90’s at the height of their big copier business when they were actually beating Xerox because the Kodak machines were WAY more reliable.
We went to look at some OCR software they were developing to sell, but as I remember almost everybody had OCR just about done at the time, so no big whoop.
But we DID see a BIG 4-color copier that was revolutionary. This was at the time when smaller, Ethernet-attached printers were just starting to come out. So I was REALLY excited about what they had and suggested that if they just tacked on a rasterization engine and an Ethernet interface, they would have a world-beater of a product WAY ahead of the competition, even though they were just working on a high-speed, high-capacity model.
Well, our excitement was squelched faster than the Pointy-Head Boss could whip out a fire-hose when we were told that management wouldn’t allow what we suggested because the only market that MANAGEMENT could possibly imagine for that color copier were that CEO’s of the Fortune 500 companies might want one for their own offices so their secretaries could prepare color hand-outs for them for big meetings, like board meetings, etc., and the marketplace wouldn’t be much bigger than that for color copiers/printers.
I shook my head and absolutely knew right then and there on the spot that Kodak was going to go bankrupt, and it was just a matter of time.
True story.