[shuttertalk]

Here's a sobering insight and analysis on how Kodak ended up the way it did.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/busi...88,00.html

It's amazing to think that they used employ 30,000 people in a sprawling 195 building campus in Rochester, New York. These days it's down to 7,000 and the future is uncertain for even these.

"The mistake," Matteson says, "if you want to talk about a mistake at all, was that Kodak could never separate itself from the notion of being a company about images." There were apparently repeated, although half-hearted, attempts to reorganize the company and completely change its direction. Every new board came up with a different strategy. Kodak invested in the hope of expanding its chemicals division into the pharmaceuticals business. It also spent a lot of money trying to dominate the market in digital printing -- a plan that was pursued, abandoned and then revived once again.

Also about the digital age:

Unfortunately, the next technological leap was just around the corner, and the first smartphones were already replacing digital cameras. Indeed, people soon stopped using normal cameras to take photographs, preferring instead to snap pictures on their phones. This, in turn, triggered a race to the bottom in terms of camera prices and, by 2007, Kodak had slipped to fourth place on the American camera market. Three years later, it was seventh. One by one, Canon, Sony, Nikon and all the other camera manufactures overtook Kodak. Their products were just as good or better, and they looked nicer, more colorful and fresher.

Sad reading about the demise of an industry icon...