The examples you cite are people with operational excellence that were built up internally over many years. As an outsider I have no trust that Intel still has such talent, it seems they are fully run by bean counters now. Who says it's a Microsoft and not a Kodak? Microsoft had the immeasurable advantage of two big markets cornered for themselves: enterprise software and home computers software. Intel meanwhile is a market leader that is getting outplayed on every market, the only thing in their favor is missing volume by their competitors - that's not an advantage that is going to last long.

Kodak gets unfairly picked on. They built their business by taking a cut from every single picture taken. There was nothing in the digital camera model that could replicate that revenue stream.

Except that the digital camera was literally invented at Kodak! What if they had pivoted to building cameras themselves?

They did manufacture cameras themselves, but it wasn't enough. Remember that Kodak was making money in film manufacturing, film processing, and printing. They were literally making money from every click of the shutter. Even if they built the best cameras in the world, it wouldn't have saved them. And the ability of any electronics company to make cameras from standardized components made it impossible for them to keep a lead in cameras too.

Nah. Sensors. Sensor tech. It's hugely different from mainstream electronics or putting things together from standardized components. Sony took that lead, with Samsung and a few other close behind. Each time Nikon sells a camera, Sony gets a cut. Same thing for most other camera companies, except Canon.

Everything has sensors now, from manufacturing processes, to cell phones, to your optical mouse.

Imaging is much bigger than film.

Kodak R&D had a lead there too, but blew it bringing it to market.

> They were literally making money from every click of the shutter.

and that’s the pivot the software players made in tech, they monetised every click of the mouse (and every tap) while intel is stuck with the burden of the platform costs

Let's mash this up with the evil HP business model that's on the front page. Kodak could have sold digital cameras that required Kodak DRMed flash cards that you would have to pay to erase and reuse. And maybe the photos could be further DRMed so you'd have to take the flash card to a certified Kodak lab.

And how exactly would that have competed with five hundred other brands that didn't pull that trick? The market eventually rejected even the soft-lockin of nonstandard memory cards (think of the 12 slots nobody ever uses that come with every SD/CompactFlash reader)

I'm not even sure it was the first wave of digital cameras that did them in-- people bought boatloads of digital Kodaks in the 2000s. I recall they were very big on dock ecosystems-- drop the camera on a base to charge it, and I think they had some printer docks. That should have helped to differentiate them from cheap Olympus/Nikon/Canon/etc. point-and-shoot cameras.

Yeah, there wasn't the residual income but there was a fair bit of an upgrade cycle for a few years to make up for it, which could have bought them time to find a solid place in the market.

I think the problem was the second wave: the point-and-shoot consumer camera disappeared (outside of novelties like Instax). After 2015 or so, you're either looking at interchangeable lens systems or other prosumer/pro-level kit, or you're using a phone. Kodak never made much of an inroad in the pro-level digital market, and I'm not sure they had a business adaptable to cameraphone sales-- I don't think they made their own sensors or optics, so a licensing or subcontracting business would have nothing to offer.

My first digital camera was a Sony compact that would only take Sony Memory Sticks - one of those 12 slots you mentioned. I got tired of paying twice as much for half the memory of standard cards, so I made sure my next camera took SD.

Kodak was always a big player in the camera business, but they did it to increase the film business - they wanted people taking and printing as many pictures as possible, because that's where the real money was. It's hard today to imagine the scale of that business. And that's the problem, if Kodak had sold every single sensor that went into every single digital camera, it wouldn't have been enough to save them.

It's interesting to contrast the reaction of Kodak to that of the other big film company Fujifilm when the market for film cratered. https://petapixel.com/2018/10/19/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm...

> And how exactly would that have competed with five hundred other brands that didn't pull that trick?

I think I agree with the point you're making but I still feel obligated to point out that cheaper and better printer (like the brother laser pointed in the other thread) isn't stopping HP from making huge bank with their ink scam for decades.

Yep - no doubt - I'm not placing any actual bets. Mostly the thought is that similar to the Windows franchise, the existing Intel x86 server franchise [1], while for sure not growing, seems boringly steady enough for a good 3-5 year runway to have a decent shot at developing or finding tech oriented leadership talent. It will be interesting to watch.

As an outsider to MS, its unclear that any one particularly saw Nadella as the obvious successor to Ballmer until they announced it. He somewhat came out of wood work IIRC. Same with Lisa Su.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/income-...

Really? Because Ballmer was there from basically the start (employee #30). He held positions of leadership all over the company and quite frankly knew it inside and out. Agree or disagree with how he ran the ship he knew the ship and it was his life.

The current Intel CEO has been there for 4 years as a CFO prior to taking over as CEO. We know he can spell Intel... we know he isn't even a little bit technical (his degrees are business administration and MBA and just about all of his previous positions of note are as CFO). So basically he's going to run the company like a beancounter... which always works out well at companies that need heavy R&D to stay competitive.

Maybe? Intel is in a high-technology field, where research can take a decade to bear fruit. I hope they're already planting the seeds for that growth today, or else that they have plans that will keep them afloat for a very long time.

Do you think they'd be able to hang on for a decade without catching up?

Why wouldn't they? They probably have contracts that last over that whole time frame already, and their revenue is an order of magnitude higher than AMD.

They could lose a lot of market share and then come up with something better in the end, like in the Athlon days.

Not obvious that it will happen, but not impossible.