Friday 2 March 2012

The fall of Kodak

Kodak's former vice president Don Strickland, gave the reason was to why he left the company in 1993, "We developed the world's first consumer digital camera but we could not get approval to launch or sell it because of fear of the effects on the film market... a huge opportunity missed." It was the next, seemingly inevitable, transition that meant Kodak can now only be remembered in the history books. As other companies such as Canon advanced forward into high end and commercial cameras for amateurs and professionals, Kodak still held on to what they knew best – film. 


Kodak made what they refer to as the first digital camera in 1975, that took black and white photographs. Kodak never truly pursued this technology to any great extent or capitalised on the future market. All too soon Kodak was left in the wake of other photographic companies and their technological advances. Digital really was becoming the future, through the evolution of computers, laptops, tablets and televisions, cameras needed to keep up with the flow of this digital progression. This resulted in the public purchasing cameras to document their own occasions and not just professionals and the media. 


"No-one wants to be in the low-end compact camera market any more. Other, more profitable, camera makers are gradually pulling away from this market,"  – Chris Cheesman, of Amateur Photographer magazine. This is particularly true of modern day, where predominately everyone owns a camera phone becoming an instant replacement to cheap compact cameras. People always have their phone on them and offers instant access to the image with the ability to upload to sites (such as Facebook) especially on smart phones. This left Kodak trundling around in the footprints of their other competitors as they developed digital photography. 


Quotes from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16627167 

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