"Yeah, and there's a guy at Kodak who can tell you just as good a story about why there will always be a market for silver halide film."
Bad example. Kodak, just a month or so ago, was the first big film camera manufacturer to announce a withdrawal from that business to concentrate on the digital camera market. W/r/t their silver halide film operations, I found this:
"In September Kodak unveiled an ambitious new strategy to accelerate its foray into filmless imaging markets. It also acknowledged that chemical-based photography businesses were in irreversible decline."
You are apparently not understanding my point. Serious students of the imaging business -- including many people within Kodak -- saw this coming a lot sooner than a month ago. They were having this argument inside Kodak in 1991.
I agree it would have made no sense to withdraw from the film, or the film camera, business that early. And no one advocated that. Perhaps "last month" is indeed the correct answer to the question "OK, so when do we shoot the damned things?"
The question is, did the company have the pedal all the way to the metal on the digital stuff? Others sure did. Others didn't have to worry about cannibalizing their film business. They could go for Kodak's jugular with all deliberate speed.
OK, so as of last month, Kodak will now proceed with all deiberate speed into the digital imaging market. About time. Here is a link to consumer-grade digital cameras, sorted by "editor's rating." Kodak first appears on the list at #19. They have none of the "top 5 most popular." Is this the Kodak you remember? Or is this a guy who's been asleep at the switch while the 35mm boys (Canon, Minolta, Nikon, etc.) made the technology switch much faster?
I don't fault Kodak for this, because so many other companies have done the same thing. The minicomputer guys are all dead because in their view, every $5,000 "personal computer" was a lost sale on a $50,000 minicomputer. They might struggle against that, but they sure weren't going to help it along. Until it was too late... and now they're dead.
Every digital camera sold was another nail in the coffin of the film business, which is where Kodak made all their money. How badly did they really want to help that along? We know the answer... they were conflicted about it. So now the film business is doomed, just like everybody knew it would be someday, and they don't own the consumer camera business anymore... they let it slip away with half-hearted efforts.
Well, here's Intel doing the same thing. They know 64-bit chips are the future. And they also know that the one they have out there is not doing very well. In their hearts, they understand perfectly why people would prefer a 64-bit chip that natively executes the huge mountain of 32-bit code that's out there. That's a no-brainer. Until yesterday, they were leaving that whole segment (which is probably 80+ per cent of the market) to AMD. And now they come with a half-hearted hack on the x86 whose chief feature is that it doesn't challenge the Itanium. Wrong answer.