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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Kodak going broke?

Craig W. Bickerstaff said:
Look, we all know Red makes amazing cameras and sells a lot of them but the idea that they have 3 times the market share of their nearest competitor is something I need see some real numbers before I believe.
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How many Alexas has Arri sold? How many F35s has Sony sold? How man Red Ones and Epics has Jim sold? Jim probably sold 10 times as many Red Ones as Arri sold Alexas.

I just disagree with David's assessment that it would have been impossible for Kodak to change direction. With the right visionary leadership, ANYTHING can be done. Do you think anyone would have predicted in 1994 that Steve Jobs would dominate the phone industry?
 
Tom Lowe said:
How many Alexas has Arri sold?
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Let's flip it around.

How many new fall shows are being shot with RED camera's? By my count, the ALEXA was used on 15 new shows.... Arri's dominating the television market, that's for sure. But, they don't necessarily share the exact same market. The Red One is half the price of the ALEXA... Arri's decided that they want their camera to primarily be a Hollywood device, whereas RED did the opposite.
 
Tom Lowe said:
And yet, "a retired sunglasses salesman" did it.

All it takes is vision.
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George Eastman, created Kodak and was a visionary of his time just as Steve Jobs was a visionary of this era.

George Eastman and Kodak had plenty of vision. This current argument around Kodak is very narrow. To put it in context, George Eastman's vision with Kodak lasted 109 years. Apart from his vision in the Film Industry he was a philanthropist and funded Universlties, Schools and established the Eastman School of Music.

The loss of Kodak is not unlike the loss of 'Apple' or the loss of 'Red ' in 100 years. Hardly a platform for 'I told you so.'
 
Tom Lowe said:
How many Alexas has Arri sold? How many F35s has Sony sold? How man Red Ones and Epics has Jim sold? Jim probably sold 10 times as many Red Ones as Arri sold Alexas.
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As far as I know, no hard numbers have ever been released by any of these companies -- Red, Sony, or Arri. But you can get an interesting sense of what's being used by looking at the major rental companies in NY, LA, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, London, and other major cities, and finding out what the rental companies stock in depth.
 
Keegan O'Brien said:
Let's flip it around.

How many new fall shows are being shot with RED camera's? By my count, the ALEXA was used on 15 new shows.... Arri's dominating the television market, that's for sure. But, they don't necessarily share the exact same market. The Red One is half the price of the ALEXA... Arri's decided that they want their camera to primarily be a Hollywood device, whereas RED did the opposite.
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I think Doctor Who is going to be shot on Alexa next season as well, I saw some behind the scenes photos of the christmas special and they were using Alexa there as well.
 
Keegan O'Brien said:
Let's flip it around.

How many new fall shows are being shot with RED camera's? By my count, the ALEXA was used on 15 new shows.... Arri's dominating the television market, that's for sure. But, they don't necessarily share the exact same market. The Red One is half the price of the ALEXA... Arri's decided that they want their camera to primarily be a Hollywood device, whereas RED did the opposite.
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Even if there are, say, 100 Alexas working on TV and movies, what does that mean in comparison to Jim selling, say, 5,000 Red Ones? How does that help Arri's bottom line? It might be more prestige for Arri, but Jim is winning in sales, by a country mile. My point is, Jim came out of absolutely nowhere and revolutionized digital cinema cameras. Was Kodak not capable of doing this? What if, ten years from now, Jim is sitting on top of yet another multi-billion-dollar company? Wouldn't it be better for Kodak to be making billions of dollars, rather than going bankrupt?
 
It would be interesting to know why Eastman didn't pursue digital imaging with more vigor. They were right there with some of the earliest cameras available, albeit some of the shittiest... But they improved. It seems those in control of the company were more committed to protecting their old business than keeping up with the times.
 
We are a few more weeks into the NFL football season. Still, yet again, they go into another season shooting film. They have film aquisition and processing, trnasfer and distribution down to the speed of news organizations.

As long as they are on a film standard. do what they do and shoot and process as much film as they do year in year out, I cant see how anyone can say film is dead even if Kodak was to go broke, I can not imagine what format that place would move to as a replacement to film.

NFL Films is probably the bar for me. When they adopt a new format or become an all digital operation ill be paying close attention to what they move to.

David
 
Tom Lowe said:
How many Alexas has Arri sold? How many F35s has Sony sold? How man Red Ones and Epics has Jim sold? Jim probably sold 10 times as many Red Ones as Arri sold Alexas.

I just disagree with David's assessment that it would have been impossible for Kodak to change direction. With the right visionary leadership, ANYTHING can be done. Do you think anyone would have predicted in 1994 that Steve Jobs would dominate the phone industry?
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Keep in mind that it's not just number of units sold but at what price and at what level of profit.

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That's hardly an argument, that Kodak could be saved simply because "anything is possible". I wouldn't get far if that were my answer to every debate! How about specifics? I mean, Kodak was huge, so becoming the number one digital cinema camera making company in the world -- and remember that Kodak really has never been much of a camera company outside of consumer stuff -- still wouldn't have replaced the volume of business that film technology generated for Kodak. I was asked by Kodak people for advice over the years and I had nothing helpful to say to them, so it seems too easy to simply say that there was a solution... even though no one I ever talked to could actually think of one. To say "sure there was a solution, it would just take a genius to think it up" is one notch below suggesting that magic be used to solve the problem.

Kodak's revenues are something like 7 to 9 billion dollars? It's hard to find the real figures, but making digital cameras isn't going to replace that.
 
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Evolution is not a linear process. Malick manifested this insight in Tree of Life, and I'm sure his understanding of evolution as a networking process has been influenced and deepened by conversations with Lynn Margulis.

Kodak as it exists today is a dinosaur on its last legs and is not about to reinvent itself. Birds are often called living dinosaurs, and they were spun off from the main dinosaur line as some pretty small and obscure creatures - side attractions at the time. Much like digital imaging and color science for Kodak. So those have developed on their own without the Kodak brand, to dominate the landscape, and what used to be the main line is dying. Pretty normal in the long view of things. Could Kodak be remade? Maybe, but it has a lot of inertia, and I think "visionary leadership" works better with a cleaner slate. Seems the best visionary leadership took the ideas and has been running with them for a quite awhile now.

Since we're taking a long view, I like to throw in magnetic pole reversal when discussing the long-term life of anything digital or even electronic. Sometime in the next 1,000 to 100,000 years or so, earth will start a 1,000 to 10,000 year-long process of reversing its magnetic poles. This is a well-documented pattern that occurs in a regular (on a geologic time scale) pattern, and the proof is embedded in the magnetic stripes that parallel the mid-atlantic rift. Think of the havoc a period of magnetic field chaos could cause to magnetic storage, power lines, communication. It would make heavy sunspot years look like a summer rain shower, compared to a hurricane without end (on a human scale). Whatever civilization, if any, that emerges out of that process probably will be a bit curious about what went on before (or maybe I'm just being narcissistic). If they are curious, I think it's more likely they will be thanking KODAK rather than Hitachi, Western Digital, TDK, etc.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Kodak's revenues are something like 7 to 9 billion dollars? It's hard to find the real figures, but making digital cameras isn't going to replace that.
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It's an excellent point. No, it certainly wouldn't, but then those revenues come from more than just film stock. Processing chemicals and paper were no doubt a large chunk of that as well. We should expand the discussion to include printing technologies.

Kodak offered little or nothing in printing technologies. Sure they offer a line of papers but the whole of their image fixing business was left vulnerable when they failed to dominate in desktop printing, either in ink, toner, thermal or whatever. When the competition began touting the benefits of pairing papers to their own proprietary ink carts that were in turn tied to their printers, Kodak paper was essentially killed.

It also seemed to me, that being the defacto consumer choice in imaging made the company lax. They did little marketing to differentiate their digital cameras or papers compared to the competition. When family members went out for a new digital point and shoot Kodak barely registered on their radar, and when it was time for me to buy a DSLR Kodak wasn't even an option. Their relatively expensive digital camera backs had already failed.

There were other opportunities missed. What of color science? In hindsight, Kodak might have set itself apart with a color management system. A consumer-simple, foolproof method to guarantee color accurate prints would have been easy to market, and would have sold more printers.
 
Kodak billions:
"Making digital cameras" does not have to "replace that", there is a wee bit more to Digital than just cameras - gather up and count every last cent of digital business money, and Kodak is a pauper.
 
Scott Crawley said:
There were other opportunities missed. What of color science? In hindsight, Kodak might have set itself apart with a color management system. A consumer-simple, foolproof method to guarantee color accurate prints would have been easy to market, and would have sold more printers.
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They did exactly that, only for professionals. http://www.cinematography.net/Files/preview.pdf

It seems that a number of posters here who are finding it easy to criticize and somewhat cavalierly dance on Kodak's grave are quite unaware of the company's actual history, actual products, or actual involvement in the very things they're criticizing them for not being involved with. To me, this is not vastly different than if Ford decided to build computers. The problem is that Ford is known for cars, not computers. Kodak is known for photochemical imaging products, not digital printers and digital cameras (even though they've sold a TON of digital cameras, a fact also being overlooked here). It is usually very difficult for companies that are so connected with a specific industry or niche to move into other areas simply because they're forever seen as what they were created to be. The Apples of the world are very few and very far between, regardless of the visionary genius that might or might not be involved.
 
Scott Crawley said:
There were other opportunities missed. What of color science? In hindsight, Kodak might have set itself apart with a color management system. A consumer-simple, foolproof method to guarantee color accurate prints would have been easy to market, and would have sold more printers.
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They had one designed for the pro market, it was called the Kodak Look Management System and was aimed at cinematographers. I even made the launch film for it (I made quite a few launch films for Kodak Motion Imaging).

http://www.kodak.com/country/US/en/motion/news/nab2004lookManagerP.shtml

The problem with that system was the price. They wanted way too much for it. And there-in lies the route of Kodak's problems; they're a business built on a high profit margin - from memory, film stock had a profit margin of over 80%. I doubt Epic has a similar profit margin - though some of Red's accessories might...
 
You're getting too caught up in moral issues. Anyway, it can work both ways, "I told you so" might also derive from insight, not just ignorance.


Again, it wasn't the Scorsese's that made Kodak, it was the hundreds of millions of rolls for holiday weekend waterfalls that did the trick - not to mention the rest of the stills world,
from the millions of amateurs to glossy magazine pro's.... The output was staggering. But they are gone baby, gone. And they ain't coming back. This is business, not a conspiracy.
 
Liam Hall said:
They had one designed for the pro market, it was called the Kodak Look Management System and was aimed at cinematographers. I even made the launch film for it (I made quite a few launch films for Kodak Motion Imaging).
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M Most said:
They did exactly that, only for professionals. http://www.cinematography.net/Files/preview.pdf
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Yes, but I specified consumer and simple. That is where the bulk of the money has been, and that is the market segment they have neglected. Kodak has always taken excellent care of the pro segment.

Bill Anderson said:
Again, it wasn't the Scorsese's that made Kodak, it was the hundreds of millions of rolls for holiday weekend waterfalls that did the trick - not to mention the rest of the stills world,
from the millions of amateurs to glossy magazine pro's.... The output was staggering. But they are gone baby, gone. And they ain't coming back. This is business, not a conspiracy.
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Exactly; consumers and desktop publishing.

M Most said:
It seems that a number of posters here who are finding it easy to criticize and somewhat cavalierly dance on Kodak's grave are quite unaware of the company's actual history, actual products, or actual involvement in the very things they're criticizing them for not being involved with.... Kodak is known for photochemical imaging products, not digital printers and digital cameras (even though they've sold a TON of digital cameras, a fact also being overlooked here).
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I am not cavalierly dancing upon Kodak's grave and I resent the condescending implications made in that remark. My comments do acknowledge Kodak's digital cameras, so I am uncertain as to whether or not this remark is directed at me.

Kodak has not been a digital printer company, and treated it's digital cameras like a red headed step child. That has been it's failure. They failed to adapt and remain on top of the major evolution of their own industry. That is their undoing in an overly simplified nutshell in my own very humble opinion.
 
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David, there is a bottom line to this discussion. Is Kodak succeeding, or failing? The answer is, they are failing, and about to go bankrupt and/or out of existence. So everything else in the conversation starts from that.

It's nearly impossible to say exactly what direction Kodak might have gone in 10 or 15 years ago to adapt to new technology and trends. Would it have been possible in 1997 to predict the direction Jobs would take Apple in? At the time, Apple was a fledgling personal-computer manufacturer about to go into obscurity. Now, they dominate the phone industry, which is where the majority of their revenue and profits come from. Phones.

Bottom line: Kodak did not adapt and change themselves, and now they are going away. This in no way takes anything away from their legacy of 100 years. It's just a fact that they have failed to make the changes needed to continue as a thriving company.
 
Tom Lowe said:
Now, they dominate the phone industry, which is where the majority of their revenue and profits come from. Phones.
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Well they can make a call but they aren't phones anymore... if so Motorolla/Ericsson/Nokia would have stayed No 1...
Apple made the society change possible and made a lot of profit out of it.

Pat
 
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