A better example of that behaviour would be Kodak which invented the first digital camera as soon as 1975 then killed the project, because it was a threat to their chemical business.
Digital photography works not just because of the camera but because of the surrounding digital ecosystem. What would people do with digital photos in 1975?
It does not matter. In the 80s, they owned the whole photography market, now they only exist as a shell of it's former self.
By not pursuing this tech, they basically committed corporate suicide over the long run and they knew it. They knew very well, especially going into the 90's and early 2000 than their time making bank selling film was counted.
But as long as the money was there, the chemical branch of the company was all-powerful and likely prevented the creation of another competing product that would threaten its core business, and they did so right until the money flow stopped and suddenly they went basically bankrupt figuratively overnight since the cash cow was now obsolete.
Kodak did plenty of great things with digital cameras in the early 2000s. Their CCD sensors from then are still famous and coveted in some older cameras. Go look at the price of a Leica M8 (from 2006) on eBay.
The problem Kodak had is what the person you're replying to is alluding to. They got outcompeted because they were a photography company, not a digital hardware manufacturer. Companies like Sony or Canon did better because they were in the business of consumer electronics / hardware already. Building an amazing digital sensor and some good optics is great, but if you can't write the firmware or make the PCB yourself, you're going to have a hard time competing.
It's not chemical-wing vs digital-wing. It's that Kodak wasn't (and rightly wasn't) a computing hardware manufacturer, which makes it pretty damned hard to compete in making computing devices.
(Granted companies like Nikon or Leica etc did better, but it's all pyrrhic now, because the whole category of consumer digital cameras is disappearing as people are content to take pictures on their phones.)
>They got outcompeted because they were a photography company, not a digital hardware manufacturer. Companies like Sony or Canon did better because they were in the business of consumer electronics / hardware already.
Huh? This makes no sense. Sony was indeed a consumer electronics company at that time, but Canon was not: Canon was a camera manufacturer. They didn't get into electronics until later as cameras became digital: their earlier cameras were the all-mechanical kind. Sony was an electronics company that had to learn how to make cameras, but Canon was a camera company that had to learn how to make electronics. Kodak could have done the same.
Kodak, while they incidentally made some cameras, were a film and film processing company that wasn’t great at cameras and wasn’t anything in electronics.
They were much worse positioned than either a camera company, or a consumer electronics company, for a pivot to the post-film photography world.
Canon was only a camera company when it started, but by the 1960s was moving into other markets like lenses, magnetic heads, photocopiers, fax machines, etc.
Kodak could have diversified like that too, but they didn't. They were positioned badly because they concentrated almost all their efforts on film and nothing else. Of course, part of this is probably due to American business culture compared to Japanese; Japanese businesses tend to be much more diverse and long-term in thinking, but regardless, Kodak did this to themselves.
Agreed but my additional point is that Kodak actually did branch out beyond film, and did so pretty well from a technical POV.
The problem was competing in hardware manufacturing, which is a whole different ballgame from concentrating on just the imaging aspects of it. So they were reduced, near the end, to just being really a (decent) component supplier to other companies. But that's the wrong part of the food chain to be in.
> In the 80s, they [Kodak] owned the whole photography market,
No, they shared it with Fujifilm (1/3rd each in 1990 according to https://pdgciv.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/tfinnerty2.pdf). And essentially via film, film processing but no significant camera market share, which is likely far more relevant to the transition to digital.
