Kodak heading to Chapter 11

Sad. Another star goes down.

Just couldn't wean themselves off the chemicals.

I want a job like that

How come the larger the company the more obscene the bonus is for doing a piss poor job and running it into the ground? $6m for being useless while us mere mortals can be fired without a penny for missing targets that quite often are unrealistic to begin with.

With appologies to Paul Simon.

If I look back on all the crap I learned at Buis-school,

It's not surprising I can hardly think at all.

And my lack of techie forsight rather hurt me,

I went and sent the whole $%^%$ company to the wall.

Damn you, autocorrect, damn you

So, no tweet answer to the "bass question" then.

David Allen did a bit on this sort of thing

He of GTD fame said that, once, a company who made precision drill bits couldn't fend off cheap competition from China, so they re-focused their business. Did they make drill bits? No, they were in the market of making excellent holes. What else can do that? Frickin' lasers.

The company was reinvented and became very successful.

The same should have happened here. Are Kodak in the market of making film? No, they're in the market of producing great quality photos. The printer thing should have been completed by a digital camera thing (much firmer than the one we were subjected to) and a scanner thing, and a data storage thing, and an online archive thing, and a sheet-feed photo-scanner-archive thing, and a ... you get the idea.

For the company to stare at the writing on the wall for *this long* ... as someone else said, they deserve all they get.

Wow...

That's just a shame, really. Kodak did make some pretty decent digital cameras... 6 years ago. (sure, it's only 4MP, but the glass and imaging ASIC were very good for the price point and the technology level)

I will also note that Nikon also diversified quite some time ago as well, going into microscopy and other imaging fields other then pure film.

The real question is this: what will happen to the retro folks and hipsters who still use their film cameras?

how?

how the hell can a CEO be paid such a ridiculous amount of money for failure....

they haven't turned a profit since 2007, two years after he sat in the big chair... and its only the last year he had his pay cut by half for not reaching targets... what was the target? grind the company into the ground?

the only thing kodak have left of value is a handful patents (most will be for obsolete technology) and its name... the current batch of printers are not good.....

They DID buy their way into digital photography

They bought Chinon back in '04, then proceeded to screw that up.

I think they thought digital was just going to be a passing fad

You make Casio sound lucky

Casio had a long history, back to the 50's, of coming up with brilliant innovation and really clever bits of kit. I bought a Casio programmable calculator in 1977 that is still on my desk being used daily. Their digital cameras were neat and clever and were the first to include a screen to view the shot.

They blew it long ago

Photo CDs were and are superior to Picture CDs: Priced out of the market by Kodak.

1992!

The Portfolio CD was a great Kodak Innovation. But no-one could afford the software to author them. Priced out of the market by Kodak.

1993? Wikipedia doesn't even know about them. I have a demo :(

"The page "Portfolio CD" does not exist."

Picture CD quality was poor. We bought our own consumer scanner and made better discs.

Kodak knew this was coming in 1985!

The DLP was invented in Texas Instruments in 1987

This was the last wake up call for making millions doing "prints" for each Cinema Release

"On February 2, 2000, Philippe Binant, technical manager of Digital Cinema Project at Gaumont in France, realized the first digital cinema projection in Europe[7] with the DLP CINEMA technology developed by Texas Instruments."

Next was dedicated Cinema HD satellites and GPS locked, registered Cinema HD satellite Receivers to drive the Cinema DLP

By 2005 it was obvious phones would kill standalone snapshot cameras, Film, Instant or Digital.

I have an OM10. I now use a small Fuji better than many camera phones and borrow a "Serious" digital camera for serious work.

Kodak even produced Digital Cameras. But that was really the wrong market as they where never a high end camera maker, and only those would eventually survive outside phone cameras.

So what should they have done? Maybe competed with Adobe undercutting them to get market with Photo editing and also Authoring tools for PhotoCD, Portfolio CD and later VCD, DVD, BD.

Produced Digital Projectors and video cameras (with still resolution good enough to beat camera phones), eventually HD, licensing DLP. etc.

Maybe Kodak were just doomed. Like Typewriter makers. Brother has managed to stay in Inkjet market. But Kodak inkjets had nothing to recommend them in a crowded market.

Anything they had that could have been the "answer" they either did it badly, too low end, or priced themselves out of it.

Icon

But "Kodak safety film" doesn't burn.

It's significant that in the bargain store the Kodak batteries are beside the inferior Polariod AA cells that are under weight due to two big empty plastic bungs in the case.

This is what happens when you hire Ex-HP employees to be your CEO

For the last 20 years, I sold instrumentation and controls to Kodak. The bottom dropped out in 2006 when they sold film manufacturing technology to the Chinese. Then they spent million knocking down buildings at Kodak Park so they could pay less taxes, laid off most of their "brain trust", all in the name of "keeping the shareholders happy." Familiar words from Perez who emulated the work practices of Carly "Slash & Burn" Fiorina at HP whom he worked with.

The Engineering Department at Kodak was second to none, Their R&D Department was truly amazing and what they ought to do now is fire all upper level management and use the collective intelligence of their current and former technical employees and remaining patent portfolio to reform as a think tank/engineering firm just to keep the company from turning into another "Polaroid" shadow of it's former self.

Did you know that Kodak was deeply involved in the early engineering of the miniature thin film chromatography that became the diabetes glucose test strip? That technology should have brought billions but "it wasn't related to the core film manufacturing business" so they sold it off.

Did you know that Kodak was the collective mind behind the surveillance cameras and optics during WWII, Korean War, Cold War and made the cameras that went into the U2 Spyplane? That "Hawkeye" plant unit was also sold off to keep the shareholders happy.

This is a lesson to employees AND shareholders. Slash and burn CEO's are the death knell of any company that hires them. There SHOULD have been mass revolt when they hired this creep. But noooo... Greedy shareholders and CEO's come before employees, common sense, company heritage, history, American ingenuity, etc.

Now Rochester, New York is a ghost town when it used to have the highest paid, most educated workers in Upstate NY. With Kodak gone, there are hundreds of Technology vendors and support companies that will also be gone.

Antonio Perez should be forever forced to drink the containment well water from the volatile organic chemicals and heavy metals that have seeped into the ground on it's property for the last hundred years. Yeah, those chemicals that the now bankrupt Kodak will make the duty of the US EPA Superfund and NYS DEC to clean up and foist the cost off on the taxpayer.

good grief

The crime here isn't just the legacy of the firm that's being pissed up the wall, the sadness of a passing brand that we've grown up with, that you can find stencilled on buildings, or the eventual sad shelving of quality hardware (cant get the parts) its the jobs. Kodak could have held onto its chemicals business and turned out first rate analog chemical film for enthusiasts : not a billion dollar earner, but a respectable top-tier product, and gone balls-deep into imaging, digital processing, and the like, and planted their 'anchor' in IP aquisitions just like every other oversized, inflexible tech company in existence.

It didn't do those things, and now the 6 million dollar man gets to shrug and carry on living the life of riley while a company full of engineers in a field that's being relegated to history can look foward to what? a pinkslip because their CEO was incompetent and got paid anyway?

I can only hope their retirement plans werent invested in the company. Poor bastards.

Sold off their healthcare arm...

In 2007 the sold off their medical imaging arm (now re-branded Carestream Health) to Onex Corporation.

With a revenue of $2.5 Billion and a strong presence in Dental imaging, radiology and picture archiving and communications systems, it seems that Kodak did the groundwork with an eye to diversifying then cashed in.

A loss of focus has left them with only sepia tinted memories of greatness.

Chapter 11

Uh, not trying to piss in the death-watch party punch here but you *do* all realize that Chapter 11 is what you do when you want to restructure your debts, rebuild and emerge as a slimmed-down, hopefully profitable company? Right?

OTOH if they *don't* declare Chapter 11 soon they're in denial and you might want to ready the shovels; if they declare Chapter 7 the damn hole had better be ready.

What a bozo?

He was paid $5.7 million for doing a crap job.

You are probably paid 1-2% of that for doing a good job.

You're calling HIM a bozo?

Ektar's quite nice

Surprising that they brought out a new colour print film so recently if they were up sh1t creek, it's pretty nice stuff too - bit more restrained colour than Fuji. Guess I should buy a few bricks of it for the freezer...

Been a long time coming

I've dealt with Kodak as a photo and commercial user since 1973 when I worked at a photo store in HS. They have always had good products - never great - and lousy management. You can get away with a lot of bad decisions with the profits they had up through the mid 90's and still survive. They owned the supply business in consumer, commercial photo, commercial printing and medical for decades. Lived like arrogant kings. Tossed them from my first management job when they reformulated litho film and chemistry fro the first round of clean water rules. Old stuff was fantastic, new stuff was terrible but they pushed it out anyway due to the new rules. They've been following the same rule book ever since.

I'm just surprised it took this long for all the stupidity to catch up with them.

Cheap batteries

Yeah, Kodak name seems today to only exist on cheap batteries, and presumably flash cards for cameras and other peripherals - ie. no added value at all, but you could see the sense when it was a name for things photographic.

As for Fuji succeeding, remember Fuji is part of that whole Fuji Heavy Industries zaibatsu, which makes ships and cranes and trains through diggers and dozers and all Subarus down to nuts bolts motors chips and PCs. It was already multi capable and robust and massive, makes Kodak at its best look like a niche chemical co.

The film business is, apparently, profitable

Hopefully someone will buy it up and keep it going. The specialist market for black-and-white, at least, isn't going away anytime soon.

I had a Kodak Camera in 2005 that was absolutely superb. It was cheap, easy to use and also had manual features unheard of on its rivals, that encouraged me to become far more skilled than i had been. It took superb photos that took my enthusiasm further. The only snag was when I came to replace it a few years later, I couldn't find a suitable model - and bought a Fuji instead...

Inkjet photo-quality printers seem a perfect fit for their brand and traditions, have had good reviews, and break the mould by offering much lower cost per page than rivals have for years.

There will always be a small, specialist market in film photography - Kodak should have a small, specialist, independent part to deal with this.

It would be sad to see Kodak fail - the extremely strong brand alone is worth money. I think they just had too much excellent competition.

Maybe they should try Chapter 11

And see what develops.

Kodak film both profitable and exquisite

I'm in my late 30's and a photographer. All of my important and personal work is captured on 120 and 135 film. Although I sometimes use Fuji Velvia (and to a much lesser extent Ilford Pan F +), my go-to films have always been Kodak for their consistency and character.

By default, my Hexar AF is loaded with Plus-X and my Pentax 645 or the Rollei is loaded with Portra 400. (By the by, have you used the new Portra 400? Amazing, subtle, gives images with weight and substance - great latitude, too).

When I'm having fun, the mix always includes Tri-X and Ektar 100 (though I'm not completely in love with Ektar's cool blue look). And I've been known to enjoy the (discontinued) EKTACHROME E100GS. And yes, I used Kodachrome, though mostly as a boy. None of my recent decent work used Kodachrome.

I understand that Kodak's film division actually does make profit, particularly since it's been killing off different variants. Kodak take their research in motion picture film and then it trickles down into the still camera lines (e.g., the new Portra and Ektar).

It does seem criminal that Kodak's management couldn't manage the decline of film into something like a boutique business rather than milking the film profits to invest in all manner of insane things. It reminds me a wee bit of Apple in the early 1990's.

Must go and load my freezer up with Portra, Tri-X, Plus-X, Ektar and anything else I can find!

What I don't get...

...is that people here are pointing to things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yelling, "This doomed them! It was all over in 1985 / 92 / 2000", and talking about how it was a string of decisions for decades that did it... and then going RAEG on the CEO who's been there for what, five years?

Ok, that doesn't mean that a better guy (Allen Mullaly?) couldn't have done it, but to go on and on about how the die was cast and then blame the dude who showed up after the horse had left the barn is rather disingenuous.

And, as some have mentioned, Kodak did a ton of work with digital stuff in the early days - notably making digital backs for Nikons.

I always find the level of sheer venom here disappointing, and somehow surprising in spite of its regular appearance. If it failed, hate it because it was bad; if it succeeded, hate it because it doesn't deserve it...

Utter Horseshit

Kodak was and continues to be at the absolute forefront of digital imaging technology. If Kodak made a mistake with DI, it was by investing TOO MUCH in digital R&D rather than in product. Inkjet printing it exactly the kind of business Kodak should be in - it was their dye-sub printers that made digital printing a reality in the first place.

Honestly, Bayer pattern CFA, Cineon, dye-sub printer, DPX, Spirit the list of Kodak innovations goes on and on and on.

An idiotic srticle written by someone who knows nothing about DI.

It wasn't just predictable, but for Kodak it'd been relatively easy to resolve. They had so many options:

Chemicals:

Kodak has the means and resources to take on 3M and TDK easily. BASF and DuPont might be a bit more troublesome, but credible chemicals could've been possible if they thought beyond film.

Digital Cameras:

What makes a digital camera. A CCD, some flash memory a bit of chippery to process it all and a fat arsed lens. The CCD world is dominated by the Japanese like NEC, Casio, Sharp and the like. Even NEC would've been fishfood for Kodak. For flash memory a little bit of passive investment into Micron and making IMFT or something like that a 3-way JV between Intel, Micron and Kodak would have been easy. Some chippery? ARM is pretty adequate. Lenses? Carl Zeiss, Leica, all fishfood.

Heck instead of making the constituent parts, Olympus is in a spot of bother too. Snap them up and have a ready-made credible camera business zomg! And what were Kodak doing when Japan was absolutely flatlined in the last 10-15 years with all the primary photographic competition coming out of there: Olympus, Canon, Nikon, Minolta all unable to get sufficient liquidity. Kodak cash rich... 1+2 = ?

Printers:

Xerox was in trouble. Snap up Xerox, get PARC and all of the wondrous patents that came out of there, and with a combined Kodak and Xerox, HP would've become the world's best bricklayer overnight.

But no. Fail, fail more with a bit more epic McFail. Compared to others, even epic corporate failures like Olivetti seem well managed. It really beggars belief there is stupidity on this scale. Seriously, they probably revere Paris Hilton as a mind greater than Einstein.

Truly unbelievable.

Their inkjet & multi-function driver software is very nice...

...as I just learned recently when I installed it for a friend.

Otherwise it's all very true - sad but true. Kodak's management completely f'd up everything, investors should sue the entire management.

I still hope some takeover & a new, *competent* mgmt will resuscitate Kodak in one form or the other...

poor printers

Haven't had the chance for the printer to physically break, every new software update breaks any chance of printing. Forget about scanning wirelessly..

Have lost hours, good riddance..