https://i.ibb.co/bPPgvBN/Photo-37-of-100.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/G5r08cY/Photo-50-of-100.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/X2nPJgT/Photo-74-of-100.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/n1pTKC8/Photo-92-of-100.jpg
Probably shot on Kodak Gold 100 color negative with a Nikon FE2. Gosh I suddenly miss the smell of film.
I have suffered through more than my fair share of those.
> I think there was a certain baked-in assumption by Kodak and others that the digitization of photography would still look a lot like how photographs were taken and shared in the film world.
I don't have any hard numbers, but at my dad's shop we probably sold and developed 95%+ negatives vs slides. We did so little E6 (much less Kodachrome) that we didn't even bother with it in-house. Most photos were shot on negative and shared as prints, not shot on slide and shared as slide shows. So if PhotoCD was supposed to take the place of a slide projector, it was already a losing proposition.
To this day, I have my favorite digital photos printed, as do my family members. There's something more intimate about passing around a photo album than sitting in front of a display.
I think PhotoCD was one of those things that was too early since there wasn't demand for sharing digitally yet, and then too late once digital cameras came out and made digitizing film unnecessary.
I actually wrote an article for CNET when Kodachrome processing was eventually shut down. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/countdown-to-kodachr...
At the time, usable digital cameras looked like the Kodak F3 back plus shoulder-mounted hard drive in this article: https://www.businessinsider.com/digital-photography-revoluti...
Decision makers at kodak should have been able to leverage their considerable resources to gain market share with the new technology that would eventually replace their main product.
All things considered, they did a pretty good job of scaling down and staying alive. But it's a classic example of "My salary depends on not understanding it"
If you're going to do it, you want to be in the pro market, you want to be selling the body, you want an extensive first-party library and, ideally, minimal competition from external third-parties (Sigma, Tamron, etc) selling into your system.
Kodak had none of that, their only DSLR experience was building "digital conversions" of Nikon bodies (using nikon lenses) and they would have been starting from scratch.
Fuji also got really lucky that Japan fucking loves cameras, especially film cameras. Fuji has NEVER given a shit about the world outside japan, other than selling freighter-loads of color negative film (disposable cameras are still extremely popular in the developing world), they give zero shits about marketing their cameras or instant film or anything else outside the Japanese market. Their camera gear (35mm, MF, and LF) has always been top-notch and it just has zero market penetration in the US because they never bothered to market it. It's also routine to have fuji stuff (Astia, FP-100C45, FP-100C, etc) discontinued with like a week of notice to japan, and zero notice to the rest of the world, they have extremely poor organizational communication because they only give a shit about japan. But they never had to, because Japan has had a love affair with photography for 70 years now.
When you look at cameras like the Fuji X-series... those are cameras designed for the Japanese domestic market, cause they still love rangefinders. So is the Pentax Q series... americans don't get it, shitty p+s sensor, why would I buy it? you're not meant to, it's a cute little camera for japanese housewives, they just let us buy it too... sometimes.
Fuji (although later getting into the X series), did pretty much what Kodak eventually did--mostly applying emulsion and chemical expertise in addition to legacy pro film business plus commercial printing--but, as you say, much smaller and much more insular.
As I've written about in the past, Kodak gets held up as a classic example of "marketing myopia"--see any Marketing 101 textbook. But, for the reasons you cite, Kodak should just have pivoted harder into digital doesn't really hold up.
I used to be an IT industry analyst and, while they were never a particular focus, I did follow what NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi did in the server market. My general observation was that they all had aspirations to be global IT suppliers but, for the most part, they didn't want to make any material investments to make that actually happen.
Someone uses precise complicated chemical manufacturing processes that require a deep understanding of color science to produce the millions of sensors in phones, cars, cameras, doorbells, etc. And it's not Kodak.
But what would Kodak really have brought to digital--especially at the scale to replace their consumables business? After all, Kodak once owned a full chemical company (that they spun off at some point) to provide them with their chemical needs. They didn't have much in the way of semiconductor expertise. Their network of dealers could have (and actually did) provide some ability for consumers to print digital photos early on. It's not like Kodak was making anything other than cameras like this when digital came in.
Fujifilm did better with the transition to digital by leveraging their emulsion and chemical expertise. But they still had a rough time of it and were a much smaller company.