So, What About Kodak?

By Ctein

A recent column generated a number of speculative and Monday-morning-quarterback comments about Kodak and the changeover to digital. I'd like to reset the record.

Mind you, I am not saying Kodak has successfully made the transition; I think there is still a real possibility the company will go under. But the assumptions that people have been making that it's from lack of trying, lack of foresight, or an unwillingness to commit aren't supported by Kodak's history. Over the past quarter-century, Kodak has made 3.5 major attempts to grab a commanding position in the world of digital photography. All of them have failed and those failures do reflect on Kodak (certainly on their bottom line!). But it's sure not because Kodak didn't see the world of change that they were facing. For general background on that change, read my column, "The Shape of Things That Came." On to the specifics of Kodak:

In the early 1980s, Kodak started demonstrating computer-assisted photofinishing. These were hybrid systems that involved film scanning, computer data massaging, and image writing back to traditional photographic paper. They developed and successfully incorporated these technologies into successive generations of equipment. Unfortunately, that all happened behind the scenes, so it didn't establish a market position for them. Their first real effort to grab digital name and brand recognition was the introduction of Kodak Digital Media in the mid-1980s. Unfortunately, they didn't know how to market against the real 500-pound gorillas in that arena, 3M, Sony, and Teac, the companies with existing name recognition for magnetic storage media of all sorts. Kodak was put in the unfamiliar position of being the small and new kid on the block. Their marketing simply didn't know how to deal with it.

The second attempt, in the early 1990s, was PhotoCD. The science was brilliant, the technology was good, and they understood the marketplace. Not only could they provide superior image quality in a convenient, portable form, but the "jeans" won out over the "suits" and they released PhotoCD as an open standard. Smart move!

Not-so-smart moves: the "standard" evolved over several years, and you had no assurance that later generations of Photo CD equipment would color manage early PhotoCD files correctly. That was the lesser problem. The bigger one was they screwed the economics. Kodak promised the photofinishing labs that they could develop the film and produce PhotoCDs for substantially less than a dollar a frame, making the cost per roll competitive with what one-hour labs were charging back then. That promise was never met—not even close. It was so unfulfilled the Kodak later denied making such a claim, but I heard it with my own ears, said at a PhotoCD developers' conference by a qualified Kodak executive to a group of highly skeptical lab owners.

Then there was the economic disaster that was the PhotoCD home player. They sent me one to critique (not to review) and I told them exactly how and why it was going to bomb*. By analogy: suppose you decided to manufacture an economy automobile and you decided it ought to be under $15,000? Suppose the car you built to sell for under $15,000 could only go 40 mph? In order to meet their desired market price, Kodak so badly compromised the performance and features of the home players that they were genuinely tedious to use. PhotoCD never took off in the general world, although it got huge institutional use (which is why Kodak maintained it for as long as they did).

Third big effort: Quality digital cameras. Remember that Kodak used to own that market! They produced the absolute best professional digital cameras in the world, and people lined up to pay $15,000–$30,000 for them. Kodak was the Leica+Hasselblad of that world.

Then the perfect wave I referred to in my earlier column broke, and digital camera price/performance ratios started plummeting, far faster than most sane people would've predicted. Kodak pretty quickly realized they were in big trouble that way; they could no longer maintain those kind of prices to support what were undeniably superior cameras. So they tried their last big gamble: The DCS 14n. It was supposed to be the best DSLR out there by far, at a price/performance ratio that would leave other manufacturers gasping. Only two small problems: first they announced vaporproduct, to try to steal the thunder from Canon announcing their quality DSLR. But, Canon could deliver, while Kodak's camera was still months away. Professional photographers are even worse about deferred gratification than consumers.

And the ultimate killer: Kodak made a fatal development blunder and outsourced the sensor for the camera, to get it cheaply and quickly enough to meet their price point. Unfortunately, that sensor wasn't anywhere close to Kodak's usual quality. It was a horrible mistake from a company whose reputation had been built on the superiority of their sensors. When the DCS 14n finally reached the real world, it had only slightly better resolution than the Canon camera, despite having many more pixels, and the overall image quality was substantially worse. That was the end of Kodak's premier position in the professional camera market.

So, lots of attempts and lots of failures (I haven't even included lesser initiatives, like the Premier system or Kodak's thermal transfer printers). Some of those failures should have been seen in advance; some of them could only be seen with hindsight. But the bottom line doesn't really care why you failed, only that you did.

Make no mistake, though, these failures are not because Kodak has had a lack of will or long-term perspective on what photography is all about. To the extent that the school of hard knocks serves as any kind of a teacher for large corporations (and I don't know that it does), don't write Kodak off. They've had a hell of a lot of education beaten into their skulls over the past quarter-century.

Ctein

*David Alan Jay, then the Editor of Photo Techniques, did the same, long before Ctein joined the staff of that magazine. —MJ

Featured Comment by MBS: "Thank you for this posting. It is both interesting and good to hear.

"I think that in this, as with so many things, there is an element of evolutionary BVSR (blind variation, selective retention). And the BS part (interestingly) of that more or less insures that it is not possible to know for certain ahead of time what adaptations will still be breathing when the fat amoeba sings. An organism can be mutating like mad and yet still not make it within its local environment (of course, the greater population within photography is, in fact, finding adaptations that work, as one would expect in a robust and complex system). As much as we as individuals (and corporate entities, too) like to pat ourselves on the back over how well we were able to 'see' and meet the future, I think there is more randomness to the selection process than we are comfortable admitting. Kodak certainly has some smart people working for them, but that may not be enough. Still, the opera ain't over: the amoeba has yet to take the stage."

Featured Comment by Eamon Hickey: "My sense of this is similar to Ctein's and to those expressed by Josh in the comments.

"I was working for Nikon from 1991 through early 1999, and from that perch it was my observation that no company in the photography industry was savvy to the coming of digital anywhere near as early as Kodak. The efforts that Ctein outlines are ones I remember well (I quite well remember the PhotoCD, which first clued me in to the digital wave that was then still far over the horizon.)

"I'm sure that Kodak made many, many errors over that time, but, really, as Josh suggests, I think the basic problem for them was that this was too big a change happening too fast. The need for their core product plummeted drastically in less than a decade. Who could manage that crisis smoothly?

"Same for Polaroid. Great company; highly profitable for decades. Gone in less than a decade. Sure, their management made many mistakes, but they had a huge bottom line problem: their product just wasn't needed any more."

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "I have to disagree with the remark from 'MBS,' 'Still, the opera ain't over: the amoeba has yet to take the stage.' Yeah, it basically is. If you're going to use life/science metaphors here, Kodak's energy source is evaporating...specifically, its capital value. While EK is riding a bit of the same wave currently moving through the equities markets it's merely a floater. It has sold enough stock to paper the planet and still has a total market cap of just over $1 billion. But its stock has traded below $8 for the past year and at this writing closed at $4.67. Kodak's latest significant desperate move was to suspend their dividends after the fall of 2008. This was something of a death knell for many investors, since EK spent most of the past century as a dividend-paying large-cap value stock.

"Kodak is now firmly categorized as a 'distressed' stock in the investment world, very few members of which have any confidence that they can pull out of their descent into oblivion. They're only barely (and mostly only internally) considered to be any part of the new world of imaging by the capital markets. Most of the investment interest in EK comes from vultures waiting for opportunities to feed on its parts.

"The 'smart people' on Kodak's payroll are utterly irrelevant in the wake of so many poor and delusional management decisions over the past 20 years. Yes, Kodak is making some good products here and there.  But they're breathing the air in their long-buried coffin.

"As 'bobdales' so succinctly observed earlier, 'Dead man walking.'  Yup."

(Prior to devoting his time to art and photography, Ken spent many years toiling in various parts of the institutional investment management world. —Ed.)

Comments

[mitchell]

Isn't kodak making the sensor for the Leica M9?

[Mike Johnston]

mitchell,
Yes, the KAF-18500, a CCD type made specifically for the M9. The S2 also uses a Kodak sensor.

Mike

[fjf]

Hey, I bought Kodak Digital Media. 10 5 1/4" 360k disks at an introductory price of $50 dollars discounted from $75 (if you think that a bad price, a 20 MB hard drive was $500). I bought them at my local camera store as there were no consumer focused computer stores in those days (come to think of it there were no consumer focused computers either!). Came in a box of delicious Kodak yellow, like a humongous box of K25. Still have the box! Bought elsewhere once I realized my computer was colour blind :-)

[Roger]

And from Mr. Hayzlett and Kodak we have this over on Twitter:

# kodakCB

Like to have lunch 2day at #CES at the Kodak booth w/ @jeffreyHayzlett CMO of Kodak? Tweet what you would share w/us & we'll pick a winner about 7 hours ago from web

# Jeffrey Hayzlett

I will host #CES today lunch for person to share best idea you have for kodak-- give @kodakcb your pitch

I'm not at CES but I went ahead and replied. Said I'd love to see the return of the Retina as a Micro 4/3 camera. Ain't gonna happen but what the heck.

[Archer Sully]

Bottom line: there's still plenty of hidebound thinking at Special K. I sure hope they survive, even though I'm mostly using Fuji and Agfa film right now, the craft needs Kodak, too. Of course, if the film business is viable on its own, it will survive.

[Geoffrey Wittig]

I can't claim the kind of access to inside information Ctein has had over the years, but I have spoken at length with several former engineers from Kodak's digital labs. I've also lived in the Rochester media market for over 20 years, which provided a ringside seat to Kodak's meltdown. There were (and are) many brilliantly competent and far-sighted folks working on digital photography at Kodak. However, the parallels with the fumbled breakthroughs made by Xerox PARC (another Rochester-based company, by the way) are quite uncanny. Twenty years ago, Kodak was on the leading edge of most digital photography technologies. Today they're still competitive in extremely high quality (i.e. medium format) digital sensors and a handful of niche technologies, but they have lost the vast amateur/enthusiast market they once dominated. The company is a ghost of its former self. They've been largely supplanted by Japanese digital imaging companies. Epson enjoys the kind of profit margins on printer inks that Kodak once saw from film and paper.

Circa 1990, Kodak's labs had plenty of cutting edge digital techology in the pipeline. But the exceptionally profitable film business—Kodak commanded a substantial price premium based on its reputation for quality—left management fatally blinkered. When aggressive moves into digital photography might have made a difference, Kodak instead ruinously sank over a billion dollars into APS. When the magnitude of this fiasco became apparent, Kodak's recovery 'strategy' was to fund a crash conversion to digital photography with profits from expanded film sales in the developing markets in Asia & Latin America. But amateur photographers in these emerging markets ignored the yellow boxes and bought digital cameras instead.

[Omar]

You know, it's funny the silliest things that can turn you off a brand.

Roughly ten years ago, I was working a company that had some Kodak cameras and was running Win98. They upgraded to Win2000, which broke the driver that was needed to get the pictures off the camera. Kodak's answer was the camera was a consumer model, and the operating system was business, so they weren't planning on releasing drivers to allow that camera to be used anymore. Remember that Win2000 was the foundation that WinXP, Vista and Win7 are built on.

Ever since, I always recommended that people stay away from Kodak.

[Dale Moreau]

Don't forget Kodak's "Center for Creative Imaging" located in Camden Maine and closely associated with the Maine Photographic Workshops. It was a joint venture with Apple (John Scully had a summer house in Camden)
It was short lived, my assumption because of the economic timing and what was perceived as extravagance by the Kodak Board. But it was a great place, I was fortunate to provide the audio systems for the facility and had the pleasure of meeting visiting photographic dignitaries like Douglas Kirkland, Herbert Keppler and Creative artist Joni Mitchell.

dale

[George]

The new Ektar 100 frequently resides in my Leica M6... as does their great line of Portra films. (And, of course, Tri-X and new T-Max.)

I bought the Leica to combat the sterile and harsh look coming out of the digital cameras I've owned. Yes, I still shoot digital quite a bit, but my Leica with film allows my soul to let out a happy sigh every now and then. So, I'll continue to purchase film as long as Kodak, Fuji, and Ilford keep making it.

[Mike Johnston]

Omar,
Oh, Lord, I know, I know...I could tell you SO MANY stories about Kodak's obsession with the consumer/professional split in the '80s and '90s...they were completely set on making the Universe fall into one or the other categories. Seriously, I could tell you six stories before I got started.

Mike

[Paul Amyes]

Personally I think that Kodak dropped the ball long before the advent of digital. For many photographers working in Europe during the early 80's the death knell was sounded when they transferred the bulk of their Kodachrome processing to France. The system was so huge that films got lost on a regular basis and turn around times that often exceeded 4 weeks. I had film from several assignment go missing and lost jobs because of the turn around times. Kodak acted as if they were the only game in town and in their arrogance denied there was a problem and refused to listen. Then came along Fuji with their E6 films and the professional's life became so much easier, 1 hour turn arounds and a company that was willing to listen to its customers. I haven't used a single Kodak product since then and I know a lot of other photographers did the same.

[Ken Tanaka]

Kodak's history presents an excellent example of the ol' corporate wisdom "Each of us is smarter than all of us."

[bobdales]

Dead man walking.
bd

[hugh crawford]

"the consumer/professional split in the '80s and '90s..."

Oh that's nothing, trying to buy aerial photography film that was in their industrial/government sales dept was Kafkaesque.

Aerial Pan-X turns out to be my absolute favorite portrait film.

Once digital projection of feature films in theaters takes over completely I think Kodak won't be able to continue to make a profit in film because the volume just won't be there.

[Brad Nichol]

In the early eighties I worked in a minilab using Kodak gear and materials, each fortnight or so the Kodak rep called by to chat, offer help and sort out issues. He was a top guy, so here we were in mid 1982 and he says to us "the future of photography is going to be all electronic (the word digital was not used) and it is going to be a revolution" the then went on to tell us about some of the ideas and innovations Kodak had in mind. We probably learnt a bit more than other labs because our manager was an ex Kodak tech and knew the rep really well.

Our response was disbelief, we said something like, There is no way that will work, video footage is horrible etc, basically we laughed the whole thing of as a waste of effort sure Kodak had really taken a dead end path.

He was right of course, but one wonders how Kodak lost their way so badly.

Maybe it was stubborn pride and underestimation of the competition, even at that stage most Kodak folk seemed unable to accept that that Japanese upstart Fuji could possibly make film products that would be even half as good as theirs.

I hope Kodak goes on and continues to innovate, they have after all one of the richest histories in photography and we all have benefited from their work. But frankly they have also a history of releasing some pretty half baked products which have tainted the market against them so it won't be easy.

[erlik]

There is one more moment in the Kodak saga. Several years ago, they employed IBM as their consultants. (IBM switched from hardware to software and consulting and solutions.) IBM suggested a change of the business model. So Kodak divested themselves of their camera division.

Now the Kodak compact cameras are manufactured somewhere in the Far East, while Kodak, afaik, gives only the name and the sensors.

They are pretty big in the medium format sensors, though. Beside S2, they manufactured the sensors for Hasselblad: KAF-31600, KAF-39000, and KAF-50100. 31, 39 and 50MP, respectively. I wonder where their 40 MP, KAF-40000, sensor ended.

[scott kirkpatrick]

Re: "consumer" vs "professional" markets at Kodak in the '80s and '90s

I spent those years at IBM, which back then rejected any ideas with a tinge of "consumer" market about them, always asking, "does this open up a multi-billion $ market." The PC was smuggled around the IBM development executives by a team of 10 engineers that grew to 100, then to 1000, moved out of rented quarters in Delray Beach into a legacy architected round building (expensive!) in Boca Raton, then to 5000 people in Raleigh, NC (much cheaper setting). After a near-death experience in the mid '90s, IBM sold the PC business to Lenovo in China, spun off the printer business (Lexmark), sold the hard disk business to Hitachi (keeping the software and systems parts). Today, IBM is making more money than ever and the stockholders (like me) are happy. As an employee, I didn't look forward to refocusing IBM on the "professional" side of mostly Fortune 500 customers, but I am now in academia.

I think the difference between Kodak and IBM is that I can't believe that the "professional" side of Kodak's business ever had that much money to offer, to add to the obvious prestige factor.

scott

[Speed]

From Kodak's 2008 Annual Report:

"Kodak holds top three market shares in many major categories in which it participates, such as digital still cameras, retail systems solutions, online imaging, and digital picture frames.

"Kodak has the leading share of the origination film market by a significant margin ...

"The distribution of motion pictures to theaters on print film is another important element of the business, one in which the Company continues to be widely recognized as the market leader.

The old girl's traditional markets have changed and she ain't as grand as she once was. She's made some big mistakes over the years but she ain't dead yet. Not by a long shot.

Business is hard. Big business is really hard.

[Josh]

You have to put this into perspective. First, it's easy to tell in 2010 what Kokak did wrong in the 90s. Fact is, however, that Kodak did recognize the importance of digital and was a strong innovator. The DSLR as you know it today was brought to market by Kodak, in a very clever and effective way. Lookup the DCS520 and it's predecessors, or the RFS3570 scanner!

What Kodak missed was the transition to mass market and consumer electronics - but seriously, the market moved in such a frenzy that nobody would have been able to predict anything. And you noticed that many fine companies went out of business - Konica, Agfa, Bronica.. For the sake of comparison, who saw coming that e.g. Sony, the owner of the portable music player market, would be humbled by a niche computer manufacturer?

The fact that Kodak still exists is an achievement. The business model it relied upon for more than a century was obsolete within a few years. They even had chances to become relevant players in digital photography, as was already mentioned. Kodak reinvented itself, and is still in business. And without a taxpayer bailout.

Compare this to Agfa, a company with a very similar business model. Agfa plainly refused to acknowledge that the world had changed, rejected all possible innovations and preferred to go out of business. In fact, I have never seen anybody refusing progress so stubbornly as the Agfa folks.. as a car manufacturer, the taxpayer would have come to rescue - but a photochemical manufacturer does not have such privileges.

Kudos to Kodak for still being around, it's a dinosaur that survived ice age. Given the fact that corporations with such a history and size usually are totally unable of changing, this is a huge achievement.

[Mike Plews]

This thread makes me sad but it also got me off my dead butt to order a a few pro-packs of TXP 120 while I still can.

[Peter Hovmand]

Well, I will never, NEVER forgive them that they took my Kodachrome away ...

[David Comdico]

Two of my favorite film stocks are Ektar and Tmax 400 (TMY-2), both recent additions to the Kodak stable of film. To me, both of these look very modern and at least as good as the best that digital can offer--and in my opinion better. The loss of Kodachrome was tragic but the loss of Kodak would be catastrophic. Keep shooting Kodak.

[Joe Boris]

In the year that Kodachrome processing was passed off to other (inferior) hands, Kodak was 'reinventing' itself as a manufacturer of branded clothing, among other divestitures.

And those film products that Kodak marched out to replace Kodachrome were poor substitutes, rushed to market far too quickly, so that we (professional) consumers were left to discover their fatal flaws while supporting ourselves and families.

As sad as it is to see a great American company toppled from the highest perch of success, that fall was triggered from within, when the company trashed the trust of its professional consumer base.

[Brendan Gray]

In spring 1987 I was taking a undergrad marketing class as part of my degree, and our teacher had previously worked for Kodak. She said, basically that before the Polaroid lawsuit, Kodak deemed themselves in the "silver haloid photography business" and afterwards changed that to "we're in the picture taking business" which seemed like a better fit.

They used to give a large annual bonus based on profits. Employees would plan vacations and major home appliance purchases based on the bonus and after they lost the lawsuit with Polaroid, there was no bonus that year.

And speaking of Photo CD, it wasn't really an open format. Yeah, Photoshop and some other graphics programs supported it, but the discs had to come from Kodak at a cost of $10 each and there was no way a person could make them themselves. I treasure my PhotoCDs and wish there was a way to get PhotoCD quality (at a minimum) easily of my slide and negative collection. The last time I ordered a Photo CD it was spring 2002 and I paid a premium, somewhere around $50 for one roll of slide film. It was a special case and I had to do it.

[Warren Hinder]

The gradual loss of the pro E-6 market to Fuji and the lack of a viable digital consumer printing device like the Fuji Frontier saw Kodak lose substantial market share here in Australia. Skinny margins on digital cameras also adds to the losses. I hope they survive as competition keeps all players honest.
Warren

[David Dyer-Bennet]

It's interesting; I don't really find the progress of digital imaging from about 1999 to be that surprising. It was a new area of digital technology, and hence participated in the typical very steep progress curve. Maybe that was optimistic, but it does seem to be the way things behaved.

Kodak's mistake-in-hindsight was certainly in expecting the consumerization to be slow. The company that inflicted the 110 and Disk cameras on us certainly ought to have been prepared to understand that the mass consumer market didn't require that much technical quality; then again they might have been remembering that stuff being overrun by the compact AF 35mm P&S cameras in the 80s, on the basis I believe of their better image quality.

[ctein]

Dear Brendan,

The Polaroid case is an interesting one. There is a certain amount of karma involved, although not enough to save Polaroid. Kodak decided to get into the instant camera business in the late 1970s as corporate warfare. They didn't expect to make money off of that sideline; they wanted to siphon away enough of Polaroid's profits that Polaroid wouldn't have the resources to invest in competing with Kodak in the conventional film and paper markets. (I don't know if Polaroid ever had any intention of doing so, but Kodak was afraid they might.)

Why Kodak decided to so blatantly infringe upon Polaroid's patents is beyond me; it wasn't even a close call. By the time the case was resolved, though, it was too late to do Polaroid much good.

Interestingly enough, Polaroid was a company that didn't have a clue what digital cameras were good for, unlike Kodak. Shortly after Polaroid introduced their first digital cameras, I had a conversation with a few of their higher sales and marketing people about it and I commented that this was a very sensible thing for Polaroid to be getting into, since the digital camera was clearly the Polaroid of the 90s. So help me God, they looked at me blankly. At that point I knew they were doomed.

As for PhotoCD, I think you may be confusing failure with intent. So far as I know, Kodak was, indeed, the only supplier of equipment to make PhotoCDs, but that wasn't their plan. Their intention was to license the technology to anybody who wanted to build PhotoCD equipment. The problem was that they failed to establish a new industry-wide standard with it, and so nobody else cared. Had it succeeded, they wouldn't have been making all the CD blanks and mastering equipment; they'd have been skimming a small but highly lucrative royalty off of all the licenses.

Only one of my PhotoCDs came from Kodak; the rest of them came from independent labs. Kodak was not the only source of PhotoCDs.

As for being able to make PhotoCDs yourself, that was never in the plan; when PhotoCD came out, you couldn't even buy an affordable CD burner for your computer (unless I have my dates mixed up). That was still several years off -- you could buy an industrial production unit, not the same thing. Maybe if PhotoCD had become an industry-wide standard, the mastering software would have migrated down to the home computer level. But that is in some alternate reality.

~ pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
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[ctein]

Dear folks,

I hadn't planned on getting into Kodak's economic missteps, but Ken inspired me.

The most charitable phrase to describe Kodak's economic strategy in the 1980s would be "bizarre." The company was essentially run by its pension program. It had an exceedingly strange board of directors and equally strange agendas.

Somewhere in there, Kodak management got the notion that they were in the business of making money. That's fine if you're a mint; for most other companies it's the road to really bad decisions. Kodak started playing money games. There was one year in the mid-80s when Kodak made more money off of arbitrage than anything else, according to an inside source. I never verified they made that much, but it's where their head was at; they were moving resources and money around with the goal of optimizing the return on the money, rather than using it to develop their future.

To maximize their available cash, Kodak decided to drastically cut employee expenses. They instituted wave after wave of early retirement, sometimes voluntary, sometimes not-so-much. They saw it as a major win each time they could divest themselves of a 20 or 30-year employee.

The disaster in the making is that most of the company "gurus" were just such employees. The gurus are the people who know all the stuff about making something that isn't written down. And, believe me, an awful lot of manufacturing art and craft is not written down; it's just stuff you learn from years and years of experience. Kodak started having massive quality control problems in the mid-80s. Surprise! On the trickier products, yields went down, production costs went up, and profits went away. And then the products disappeared from the catalogs entirely. Kodak's catalog shrank and shrank; they were no longer the "go to" company that had everything you could possibly need.

Even on products that weren't obviously tricky, lots of inefficiencies appeared. For instance, you wouldn't think there would be much of an art to making silver step tablets, would you? Well, that's what Kodak management thought. And they had one guru who was the resident expert on that. They pushed him into early retirement. He kept asking for a trainee. They provided him with a trainee three days before his last day. Guess how much the trainee actually learned.

I saw firsthand how much difference a guru could make. In the mid-1980s, Kodak lost control of the process for making dye transfer paper; it was all coming out defective. Not only could they not make it correctly, they wouldn't even admit that it was out of spec. Finally I forced to them to give me their attention and flew to Rochester for a meeting with the production people, all of whom had been claiming everything was just fine. But for the sake of form, they brought in the Paper Guru. I handed him the prints that I claimed were defective and production was claiming were within spec. He looked at them for less than 10 seconds and said, "Oh, that's obvious!" And he knew exactly what adjustments needed to be made to the production process to make the problem go away. The whole matter took 15 minutes of his time and no additional expense for Kodak.

The following year, the Paper Guru was in retirement.

That's what Kodak was like in the 1980s. If Ken is correct that they are on their last legs, then it's a testament to just how long it can take a really large company to go terminal.

~ pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
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[Johnny R]

The real pity is that Kodak seems to have given up on the film market. Film still has its place and I am sure marketing would help to sell a lot more of it.

[Keith B.]

When the Motion Picture Industry substantially switches to electronic capture(cut to shot of Mr. Sony rubbing his hands gleefully and laughing maniacally), Kodak will be dead.