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RE: Don’t Be Like Eastman Kodak

in #photography7 years ago

I went to school at RIT near where Kodak was headquartered. This was back in the late 90's. Their sponsored namesakes were all over the campus and city of Rochester, so we were all acutely aware of this entity (along with Xerox). Their business model was already obsolete even before the digital camera came along, simply because of competitors in the film space like Fuji blowing them out of the water. Kodak had what I like to call big-company syndrome, like all successful corporations seem to get.

Now that I've noticed this pattern in business over the years, I'm convinced that it's almost inevitable. The story goes something like: small company hustles and innovates, small company achieves wild financial success, small company becomes big company, big company becomes sluggish, myopic and entrenched in political turmoil, big company dies (or at least their business model is challenged and they have a big shakeup in management along with restructuring, etc).

All of the big tech companies like Alphabet, Apple, Twitter, Facebook and others are in the process of doing this now IMO. It won't be long before we start hearing stories about layoffs and quarterly losses from those names.