Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
7 months ago
That sounds a lot like Kodak.
I remember running into Kodak engineers, at an event in the 1990s, and they were all complaining about the same thing.
They were digital engineers, and they were complaining that film people kept sabotaging their projects.
Kodak invented the digital camera. They should have ruled the roost (at least, until the iPhone came out). Instead, they imploded, almost overnight. The film part was highly profitable.
Until it wasn't. By then, it was too late. They had cooked the goose.
If they owned the digital camera space like they should have, who’s to say they wouldn’t have eventually released a smartphone. It probably would have been an absolutely incredible camera first, and some mobile internet and phone features second.
One can really dream up a fascinating alternate timeline of iKodak if they didnt shoot themselves in the foot.
And even if they didn’t, maybe it would be Kodak sensors in iPhones instead of Sony sensors. A lot of possibilities.
Note that Nokia was already "great camera, first smartphones".
Sony did a rather short-lived modular camera phone.
It had a magnetic mount, where you could snap on external lenses.
I'm pretty sure they still have some variant of the concept, except that it's an external camera that uses your phone as a viewfinder.
I'm not a Steve Jobs fan, but one business-quote I do like: "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will."
In other words, it could have been better for Kodak as a whole if they allowed their digital-arm to compete more with their film-arm, so that as the market shifted they'd at least be riding the wave rather than under it.
I'm also not a Steve Jobs fan, and this reminds me of how Flash died[1].
The Flash Renaissance was the counter-era to the search despair era we currently find ourselves in.
In the same vein as Kodak, I wonder what the alternate timeline would look like where Adobe cannibalized native apps.
[1] https://youtu.be/65crLKNQR0E?si=mXPgXxlMRxU-xjcu&t=2472
The mistake Adobe made was in canceling Flash instead of open sourcing it. Publish a spec and the let browsers implement the client side, then you can keep selling tools to make animations without everyone having to deal with the bug-riddled proprietary player Adobe clearly had no interest in properly maintaining to begin with.
It's kind of astonishing that all these years later we still don't have something equivalent in browsers. In theory they're Turing-complete and you can do whatever you want, but where's the thing that makes it that easy?
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The just-so story about Kodak is one of those things that bugs me. Kodak did own the digital camera market, stem to stern, for years. They did not ignore it. They did, however, invent all that stuff a little early, before the semiconductor manufacturing technology had matured to the point where it could be a consumer good.
The company imploded because it spent all of its time, attention, and capital trying to become a pharmaceutical factory, starting in the mid-1980s.
Yeah, lots of things happened for a perfect storm of downfall…probably starting with the antitrust breakup of the film processing division.
They did indeed have a huge patent arsenal from all their research efforts that was very valuable. They were also really good at consumer tech - so it’s a shame it didn’t amount to more.
Well, NYSE: EMN is worth $12 B.....
One of the problems was just how profitable film was. No amount of digital camera sales is going to be as profitable as being able to charge people $2 per photo (film+development).
Fujifilm survived by diversifying more into a chemical company than a consumer product company (whereas Kodak sold off those portions of the company as "not being core to consumer imaging" and focused on printers(??))
And yet even Fuji are now back to having traditional film photography being their single largest revenue generator (their instax instant film is now so popular it is chronically sold out and they are doubling factory capacity to keep up)