In an interesting piece on the decline of Kodak, Kenny Suleimanagich describes how it was not simply a reluctance to innovate that caused problems at the company, it was that they brought their innovations to market too early:
No matter what [Kodak] came up with, nothing digital would sell. To consumers, everything was too expensive, and to professionals, the quality was not yet good enough. “It was a difficult thing to market,” [computer engineer Peter] Sucy admits, “especially for people who didn’t have any kind of experience marketing this kind of product; people who didn’t really know what it did.”
In the end, being early did not help, because the market simply wasn’t ready. As obvious as the endgame was, Kodak’s leaders were faced with an unwinnable predicament: either keep investing in end-of-life products until the profits dried up — and die over the long run; or switch to stillborn product lines that produced mostly red ink in the ledgers — and die immediately.
In his book, The Disappearance of Darkness: Photography at the End of the Analog Era, published by Princeton Architectural Press, Toronto-based photographer Robert Burley documented the closure (and destruction) of the Kodak facilities in Rochester, Toronto, and Chalon-Sur-Saône. Pictured above are Burley’s photographs ‘View of Kodak Head Offices from the Smith Street Bridge, Rochester, New York 2008’ and ‘Implosions of Buildings 65 and 69, Kodak Park, Rochester, New York [#2] October 6, 2007.’
Burley talks about the project and the book in this short video:
A slightly longer 5- minute short about the project can be found here.
(On a related note–at least in my brain–the New York Times reported on the resurgence of vinyl over the weekend. The manufacturers are apparently having some difficulty meeting demand. The last new press was built in 1982. Perhaps analogue photography just isn’t out-of-date enough yet for some people?)
(And full disclosure etc: PA Press are distributed in Canada by my employers Raincoast Books)
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