The market has been there, Kodak just didn’t read it right. They labeled enough junk to get a bad quality rep and then it was too late to recover. They marketed some really pitiful stuff.
There are things they could probably still do.
Not everybody wants to spend a lifetime on Photoshop, for example, going over every single detail in photographs to get things right.
Kodak could probably offer after-photo services that many people would probably pay for.
It's been 40 years since I read their story in some 60s magazine.
/johnny
At the key moment, Kodak was more interested in keeping existing retailers happy with the 3-visit model of film sales than keeping end-user button-pushing picture-taking customers happy. Retailers liked customers coming in once to buy film, once to drop it off, and once to pick up prints - and doing that just a few dozen pictures at a time; once customers are in the door they tend to buy things, even if there just for pictures. Facing the onset of digital photography, retailers threatened to drop Kodak product entirely if that 3-visit model was threatened by Kodak shifting focus to digital (few, if any, visits and taking hundreds of pictures per cycle) ... that scared management over short-term sales figures. They were planning for a transition to digital, but couldn’t stomach the need for such a fast switch by end users.
I tried suggesting a “push the button, we do the rest - your pictures will show up in the mail” digital product, but being a mere peon that went nowhere. So did the company for not doing it.