Kodak was larger than the entire digital camera industry currently is, by almost 3x, $31 billion[1] in 1993 dollars which is 31 billion in 54 billion in 2018 dollars[2].

The entire digital camera industry was worth about 18 billion in 2017[3]

Even if they captured 100% of the market (which would have been basically completely impossible), it would have been a massive disaster for them as a company, and to the hundreds of thousands of people they employed in photo processing.

[1] https://www.photosecrets.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-kodak

[2] http://www.in2013dollars.com/1993-dollars-in-2018?amount=310...

[3] https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/4514578/digital-c...

Does that 18 billion include the smartphone industry? I think phones are the real successor of the mass-market element of Kodak’s business.

Pivoting from making film and cameras to making cellphones would have been like McDonalds pivoting into becoming a laptop manufacturer.

Yes, cellphones contain a camera, but the similarities end there.

You're talking from an industrial perspective and the parent is talking from a user perspective. You're both right.

Smartphones replaced compact cameras for a huge portion of casual photographers but as you point out it's not like camera makers could easily pivot into making smartphones (some of them probably could have if they had anticipated the trend enough, but by the time the iphone came out it was probably already too late to catch up).

The point is that, if that $18B number includes phones, Kodak wouldn’t even be able to address that part of the market (as you pointed out), rendering the addressable market even smaller in comparison to their previous position.

That's probably true but good luck when your primary revenue source falls off an utter cliff which is basically what happened with film sales. You basically have to build a new $20 billion company within a few years.

Oh yeah I get it. They were in a tough spot. But they still almost went out of their way, it felt like, to screw with the parts of their business that were trying to save them.