Kodak gets picked on unfairly I think. When you look at the revenue streams before digital photography took off, you can see that Kodak had their fingers in every part of it - cameras, film, processing, printing. They made money every time you took a picture. There's simply no revenue stream in digital that's big enough to replace that. It's impossible to shrink a company by 90% gracefully.

Kodak may have been boned no matter what, but it's still not the example I seek, of a firm that successfully "played catch against itself".

I was just pointing out that there were reasons it wasn't successful beyond just not being a viable approach.

Eastman, which was spun out of Kodak in 1994, is doing quite well. Demand for resins, plastic sheets and intermediates to make plastics products hasn't dropped. Kodak had no idea what their core product was going to be, and bulk chemicals would have been a good bet.

Interestingly, Fuji managed to pivot into polarized films for LCD panels when faced with the same problem. https://petapixel.com/2018/10/19/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm...

I guess they could have just invented Instagram or something

That would have been interesting, but they still would have needed to figure out how to monetize it.