News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?.

Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by aaronbrethorst on Sunday July 17, 2016 @04:45PM (#12111734)
There are quite a few articles online that go into some detail about it. Just search for "Kodak Clay Christensen", or something similar. Here's one: http://www.economist.com/node/21542796

    Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its
    executives “suffered from a mentality of perfect products,
    rather than the high-tech mindset of make it, launch it,
    fix it...”
    
    Bad luck played a role, too. Kodak thought that the thousands
    of chemicals its researchers had created for use in film
    might instead be turned into drugs. But its pharmaceutical
    operations fizzled, and were sold in the 1990s.
On a related note, I just purchased a 10 pack of Kodak Portra 400 4x5" sheet film last night. I normally shoot Kodak's Tri-X and 5222 cine film, or Fuji's Acros 100, but thought it'd be fun to get into large format color photography on occasion.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by Turing_Machine on Sunday July 17, 2016 @05:20PM (#12111891)
Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma, is well worth reading.

I don't think it's one of Christensen's examples (it's been a while since I read the book) but IMO the all-time greatest blunder of this type was Sears closing down their catalog operation the same year the first graphical web browser was introduced. The younger readers may not remember this, but there was a time when the Sears catalog sold everything. You could even buy an entire pre-cut house that would be shipped to you for assembly.

They basically had Amazon, and threw it away. Now they're essentially nothing but a subsidiary brand of K-Mart.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by Animats on Sunday July 17, 2016 @07:03PM (#12112331)
That puzzled me, too. Sears was the first company to figure out large scale order fulfillment, around 1890. They had the back end operation figured out. They had merchandise for everything you really need in stock. All they needed was online ordering, which is the easy part.

What's left of Sears is now owned by K-Mart. (K-Mart is descended from S.S. Kresge, which operated "dime stores". Dime stores were like dollar stores, before inflation.) Now they can go down together.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by Spooky23 on Sunday July 17, 2016 @08:37PM (#12112627)
Worse, they figured harder problems out -- they had solved the delivery problem in suburban and rural areas for large items. there was a Sears franchise network where you could pick up stuff delivered by an 18 wheeler or rail rather than wait for parcel post or ups.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by Turing_Machine on Monday July 18, 2016 @12:24AM (#12113216)
Yep. Those were called "catalog stores", as I recall, and if you had your item sent to the catalog store shipping was free (or maybe reduced price -- it's been a long time, but there was definitely some kind of break on shipping costs).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by Spooky23 on Monday July 18, 2016 @08:57AM (#12114761)
I think they had a dock and you could get really big items too. IIRC, the farmer I worked for picked up a giant generator on a flatbed at one of these places.

Not sure if that was a Sears purchase or not though.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by vePhi4le on Monday July 18, 2016 @02:12AM (#12113463)
A legendary Metafilter comment re: Sears' shortsightedness: https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Declin...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by epc on Sunday July 17, 2016 @07:28PM (#12112420)
They also had a share of Advantis, which evolved into IBM Global Network. They sold off their share to IBM some time in 1996 or 1997 just as the Internet shifted from crazy to insane.

IBM, in turn, sold off IBM Global Network and much of their web hosting business to AT&T in 2000.

edit: I forgot that Kodak also had a role in the formation of IBM's Global Services business...ISSC (an acronym which I can't remember the expansion of other than the I was IBM) started as the bundling up of Kodak's I/T services organization, eventually selling completely to IBM.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by ajdlinux on Sunday July 17, 2016 @10:50PM (#12113002)
According to Wikipedia: "The beginning of IBM’s involvement in IT services can be traced back at least to 1989 when Eastman Kodak Company and IBM completed an agreement by which IBM designed, built and managed a new state-of-the-art data center for Kodak in Rochester, New York under the brand name ISSC, Integrated Systems Solution Corporation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Global_Services

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by phjesusthatguy3 on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @12:05PM (#12122519)
To be fair, though, the first 15 (27?) years of the web were terrible. There was no way Sears was going to go whole-hog on 1990's web. Or 1993's web. Or 1999's web. It's barely usable now (he says, typing this into a web forum in 2016). A cow-orker of mine has a paper copy of the "1994 Internet yellow pages" and guess how many web sites are included? 0!

Yes, somebody should have come up with Amazon before Amazon did. But they didn't, and here we are now.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by m_mueller on Sunday July 17, 2016 @06:33PM (#12112209)
That one has always astonished me a lot more than Kodak, even as a foreigner. Why the hell would you close down a successful business operation, especially of that sort?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by epc on Monday July 18, 2016 @12:10AM (#12113186)
By the mid-1990s Sears was getting destroyed by Walmart, which was running circles around them with their logistics operation.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by dredmorbius on Monday July 18, 2016 @03:29AM (#12113647)
Robert Gordon mentions that in The Rise and Fall of American Growth.

Sears shut down its catalog division in 1992. Amazon launched in 1993.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by dewster on Sunday July 17, 2016 @05:48PM (#12112041)
>Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its executives “suffered from a mentality of perfect products, rather than the high-tech mindset of make it, launch it, fix it...”

This is actually my preferred work environment. Fuck profits, I've got a rather short life to lead, and I'd like to get a little enjoyment and intellectual satisfaction for all my efforts.

Has the development of anything really lasting been rushed? "Hey, Stradivarius! Stop dicking around and glue that shit together, we'll deal with it after the sale if the customer complains!"

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by icebraining on Sunday July 17, 2016 @06:23PM (#12112164)
On the other hand, Stradivarius made 1100+ instruments, which even over his long career - 77 years - comes to more than one per month, and probably more than that over his prime period. He certainly doesn't sound like someone agonizing over making the perfect instrument, instead improving them version by version.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by mark-r on Sunday July 17, 2016 @11:57PM (#12113158)
I don't know if the story of the ceramics teacher is actually true, but it has the ring of truth and it applies to this example. Incremental improvement is a more sure path to success than striving for perfection out of the box.

http://kottke.org/09/02/art-and-fear

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by marcus_holmes on Sunday July 17, 2016 @07:29PM (#12112426)
The pride in building products is making them fit for purpose, useful and appropriate. You don't understand what that means for any given product by sitting in a workshop. You have to get people to use your product in order to understand how they use it.

The most beautiful things are iterated on endlessly. The first attempt is always crap.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by 50CNT on Monday July 18, 2016 @01:52AM (#12113420)
The problem with working on the "perfect" product is that unless you're making the right product, it can become a colossal waste of time. You see this sometimes with craftsmen in the tech space, who come up with a half-baked idea for a business, and then develop the perfect product for that. It then fails after significant development time.

For litmus tests, the MVP approach of make it, launch it, fix it is perfectly justified. Once you have zeroed in on something interesting with proof it is both technically and economically feasible, you can worry about perfection. In a sense, it's the business equivalent of measure once, cut twice.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by angersock on Sunday July 17, 2016 @10:56PM (#12113017)
Real artists ship.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by dewster on Sunday July 17, 2016 @11:23PM (#12113085)
When their art is ready, which might be never. It's art after all, not a product.

When I was gainfully employed by a large telecom, very little of what I did found its way anywhere near the market.

Most go to the grave with their masterpiece unstarted, much less signed. Free your mind.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by devb on Sunday July 17, 2016 @06:19PM (#12112143)
Regarding your aside, if you develop black and white at home, there are kits to develop C-41 and E-6 at home as well. They're as easy as any standard black and white process.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by aaronbrethorst on Sunday July 17, 2016 @09:59PM (#12112862)
I use a community darkroom about a mile from my home: http://pcnw.org

They have three film sinks, including one specifically designed for tray-based large format black and white film processing.

They also have 18 enlargers, including a monstrous 8x10" enlarger: http://pcnw.org/facilities/black-and-white-darkroom/

I bought Tetenal's C-41 kit last night with the Portra, and plan on developing there, as they also have filtered water, film dryers, and Photo-flo :)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by Laforet on Sunday July 17, 2016 @06:30PM (#12112194)
I've looked into these processes years ago but backed off because they seemed to require some really stringent temperature control. Is it no longer the case?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by paulmd on Monday July 18, 2016 @12:45PM (#12116232)
In general I'd say the C-41 kits are relatively simple for someone who's accustomed to B+W development. It comes down to being sure the chemicals are at the proper temperature and that agitation is even. There's much less tolerance for variation compared to B+W but it's still well within the reach of a diligent amateur who focuses on reproducibility and good lab skills.

The main requirement is a temperature-controlled hot-water bath for warming the chemicals, which are relatively easy to construct with some creative use of aquarium equipment. Buy yourself a digital thermometer from Amazon to verify your chemical temperatures (you should have one anyway for B+W development).

You may also want to consider a rotary development instead of hand agitation. If you can find a "roller base" unit, you can just place a standard developing tank on the rollers and it works fine. I love mine for B+W development too. Works like so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60rYmqkyfDg

E-6 is a little more complex than C-41 and I do not recommend the DIY kits in general. The DIY kits are a simplified 3-bath version of the full 6-bath process and has negative consequences for quality and long-term stability of the resulting slides. Since it's more difficult and the finished product is inferior I recommend just getting it commercially processed.

You can send it out at most supermarket photo centers, just mark "E-6 Process" on the "special instructions" box. It all gets sent to a processing company (often Fuji) and they know what to do with it. Nobody does in-house ("1-hour") processing anymore, sadly.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by Laforet on Wednesday July 20, 2016 @01:36AM (#12127100)
Thank you, looks like little has changed since I checked last time.

I live in a relatively mild climate and B+W development usually means measure the temperature of tap water once and go with it for the day. For C-41 it's also a bit harder to keep things at 39C which makers a larger gradient against room temperature than 20C, but in the end I suppose it's not too hard with a water bath.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by Finnucane on Sunday July 17, 2016 @09:33PM (#12112794)
It is mostly the case. Some of the kits are designed to be more manageable at home--not requiring lab-level controls. But still a little fussier than b&w, no matter what. Personally, I haven't looked into too much, because I am color blind and have a hard time with the printing. I stick to b&w now mainly.

I just traded two Mamiyas for a Hasselblad 503. The Mamiyas are fine, but I have too many systems to feed now.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by gchpaco on Monday July 18, 2016 @05:29AM (#12114010)
The printing is the fun part, anyway.
[ Parent | on HN ]