Goodbye Kodak
It’s sad to see Kodak, an icon of my generation, go belly-up.
Kodak isn’t alone in trying to sort out this analog to digital transition. The company’s passion for image making seems inexorably rooted in the physical creation of images, rather than the passion for sharing visual storytelling that could have been its future.
Consigned to history
This isn’t about smug digital evangelism or Facebook eating everyone’s lunch. It’s about failing to match channels with user motivations. (Google Wave, as we may recall, took a different tack to the same fate: tossing new features together without due regard for what drives people to adopt them.)
The irony is Kodak did get a headstart with the acquisition of Ofoto, but
…seemed to want to drive digital behaviour back to businesses it knew and could control. Rather than embrace digital, it wanted digital to fuel printing.
I hope other long-established businesses are listening.
