[catnipman]

Kodak had marvelous inventions in the lab that could have easily saved them, but their management was still living in the 19th Century.

I remember visiting their Rochester lab sometime in the 90’s at the height of their big copier business when they were actually beating Xerox because the Kodak machines were WAY more reliable.

We went to look at some OCR software they were developing to sell, but as I remember almost everybody had OCR just about done at the time, so no big whoop.

But we DID see a big 4-color copier that was revolutionary. This was at the time when smaller, Ethernet-attached printers were just starting to come out. So I was REALLY excited about what they had and suggested that if they just tacked on a rasterization engine and an Ethernet interface, they would have a world-beater of a product WAY ahead of the competition, even though they were just working on a high-speed, high-capacity model.

Well, our excitement was squelched faster than the Pointy-Head Boss could whip out a firehose when we were told management wouldn’t allow that because the only market they could possibly imagine for the color copier was CEO’s of the Fortune 500 companies might want one for their own offices so their secretaries could prepare color hand-outs for them for big meetings, like board meetings, etc., and the marketplace wouldn’t be much bigger than that for color copiers/printers.

I shook my head and absolutely knew right then and there on the spot that Kodak was going to go bankrupt, and it was just a matter of time.

True story.

[Lazamataz]

Rochester is a ghost town now.

At it’s height, Kodak employed 170,000 people. Now there are maybe 6,000 people, mostly security guards to make sure nobody runs off with the remaining equipment.

[SamAdams76]

Yes, the company I work for now acquired the company that bought out Kodak's copier division in 1996. We've been selling those 4-color copiers for years (CYMK) and made huge margins on them. Those margins are shrinking now as many other companies are in the game. We used to charge 12-15 cents a page and now the cost is down to about a half cent per page.

Now you have desktop printers you can buy off the shelf that have almost the same quality. It's almost cheaper to throw them away and buy another one when the toner cartridges run out!