This post is more about business in general rather than storage in specific but it’s worth the discussion.
To use some very primitive descriptors to push an idea, before the advent of photography life paintings captured a period or an age. With the invention of photography we began capturing moments.
As someone who dabbles in photography I did get a slight twinge earlier this week when Kodak filed for Chapter 11 but found it timely as we had more than a few ‘Only the paranoid survive’ conversations of our own inside EMC during our annual sales kick off earlier in the week.
Kodak, which brought photography away from glass plates with George Eastman’s creation of gelatin roll film and then carved out entirely new markets with film canister packaging, was long a benevolent patron of photographers. They did the research in chemistry, optics and electronics which the technology megacorps at the time saw no value in. Kodak didn’t only create the first digital camera they also created Autofocus and point and shoot.
Think about that.
Dean Peterson over at Kodak went to bed one night, got up the next morning and created Autofocus.
That’s a very compressed timeline I know but it didn’t exist until he created it. While you might curse autofocus when it locks on to the wrong point(s) if you’ve ever had to manually focus a camera to grab a shot at a moments notice you know that autofocus tends to tilt the odds of getting the shot in your favour.
For people of a certain age Peterson also created some iconic products for Fisher Price. There was a Fisher Price Audio Tape Recorder in our house in the 80’s and the thing could survive being dropped down stairs and having drinks spilled on it. Two things which frequently happened.
In bringing any product to market you can’t just have a good idea, you need the ability as a company to execute. Even if your idea stinks up the place if you’re an execution machine you can limit the damage and carry on with the next idea. The sign that Kodak’s execution ability had declined during the fat of the land film years came with the launch of APS, the Advanced Photographic Standard. Kodak looking at large boxy expensive digital cameras with their awful resolution and worse optics decided to take on these so called smarter cameras (They weren’t) with smarter film. (It was)
APS not only extended their existing film delivery and processing model, the multi-decade company cash cow, but also added functionality like the ability to embed metadata on the film negative itself. Stuff like date and time the film was shot at, what the aperture and shutter settings were for a shot and so on. It was clever, but there was something far cleverer already on the market. So clever I believe it was the only thing in the century since Eastman started shipping film that was market transforming to photography.
Photoshop.
With the personal computer market booming as Microsoft and Intel looked to put a computer on every desk and in every home, the web exploding with the rise of Netscape, Hotmail giving anyone an email address & attachment quota and early adopters with access to image editing software like Photoshop, getting photos off a camera and into the computer was what people wanted. Kodak backed the wrong horse to the hilt with APS, they made film smarter when they should have been looking at what was going to kill film entirely and they didn’t have the execution ability to make a save when it all went horribly wrong.
The 35mm film market continues today. APS clearly being an answer to a problem photographers didn’t have since 35mm film was perfected over more than 100 years and was proven to just work. Today APS survives, in a fashion. Those APS-C sized sensors in entry level DSLRs and compact system cameras are named such due to providing a relatively close crop factor to an APS film negative exposed in Classic mode. (The other two APS film modes being High Def and Panoramic) But APS film was a catastrophic failure and film was the marrow in Kodak’s bones.
I do expect Kodak will also survive and exit Chapter 11. It’ll restructure. It’ll shed parts. It’ll sell it’s patent portfolio to pay down debt and probably end up taking a license from the new owner to use the technologies it created, but it’ll be back in one form or another like Polaroid. Polaroid have Lady Gaga designing products for them now, I still have a Polaroid Land Camera and various boxes of expired film around the place so I’ll stick with that for a while.
The lesson I’ve learned from both EMC Kickoff and Kodak are that good ideas are worthless without brilliant execution and if you’re not up to your elbows in what’s going to kill your business then you’re not doing your job right.
