Companies that went bankrupt over bad decisions

I can't believe they have forgotten Kodak.

They invented digital photography and locked it away until all others were better.

$25B over 20 years for development and not a single product.

Gerhard

(We happened to have a TV docu on this just a few hours ago)

People are so afraid to kill their traditional products that they let other people do it for them.

Of course, the cost-per-color-photograph has dropped by about 1000:1.

Nothing was locked away. Kodak's line of professional digital cameras were amazing products, and in some respects have superior usability and software to anything being made now.

Granted, this product line wasn't going to bring in billions of dollars, but it took nikon many, many years to even catch up. Kodak sort of gave up once they no longer had a source of good SLR bodies as Canon and Nikon stopped supplying them. In tandem to the pro like, they sold consumer cameras that were pretty solid for the time which were made by Chinon, later bought by Kodak. There wasn't really anything special about cameras made the early 2000s by them though. The canon elph series sort of nailed it for a compact digital camera that produced good images and was intuitive to use.

The rest of kodak, yeah, pretty stupid with standard playbook of sell everything of value until nothing is left. Motorola did the same thing. Every business unit they sold off it doing just fine these days.

Cydrome Leader snipped-for-privacy@MUNGEpanix.com wrote in news:ssq1qh$grr$ snipped-for-privacy@reader1.panix.com:

Between Kodak and Polaroid, the entire city of Rochester folded up. One could walk down the main street and walk past a bank with a sign that said "Your Name Here" on it. They are recovering a bit now, but the city will not likely be anything like it once was for some time to come.

Right, I bough one sometime around 1996. It cost about 30% more than comparable cameras, but I considered it to be worth it because it was backed by a high performance company. It did not disappoint, it was an excellent product.

America Online, it could never seem to find a way to break out of its dial-up model into the full social media market segment.

It had a leg-up on all the others but couldn't really figure out what to do with people who had broadband other than try to throw ads at them, but without the benefit of any desirable content to go with it.

I think Kodak's big revenue stream was from consumer film sales, and consumer film processing. There were basically two suppliers for whatever consumer-grade film-roll camera you had in the early 90s, Kodak or Fujifilm.

You still got your vacation pictures processed at a drug store kiosk in

1996, and consumer digital cameras were a $1000-equivalent-2022-dollars curiosity. In 2006 consumer digital cameras were commodities and CCDs that were good enough were already being included in many cell phones, and high-end cell phones were getting 5MP cameras a year or two after that.

Shockley Semiconductor, if Shockley's genes made him so smart why didn't his company make any money.

He was a sociopath.

Yup, and pretty much all the major labs were owned by Kodak anyways.

In all fairness, nobody has ever answered what kodak should have done, even in hindsight. They primarily produced a consumer product that was going to go away, one way or another. The replacement products also went away. I can almost excuse their implosion, unlike Motorola. Semiconductors and phones never went obsolete.

The only thing I can think of is just drop the consumer products and live on as their sold-off divisions do making industrial stuff for the printing industry. They did the reverse- sell all the units that could continue to produce products to prop up the failing film unit.

The only typewritter company still in business is IBM, but they never made cheap (price not quality) consumer products, so their transition was easier and possible.

I still think Texas Instruments is the model of a clever company that has always been able to adapt to the times. They've jettisoned entire lines of products, but it was always at the right time, and there was always something new to take its place.

I don't know either. I believe revenues from film sales and processing were very good in the mid 90s; the population had grown and the economy was doing pretty good and aside from Fujifilm what else was the consumer gonna do if they wanted to snap pictures?

I expect the last thing anyone expects is for a business model to be on the verge of collapse right when it's making more money than most involved can remember. Fuji was a big zaibatsu in the Japanese style though they had their fingers in many pies, already, difficult to see Kodak rapidly becoming a big player in some other consumer electronics segment or petrochemicals or what have you.

The claim is that TI and Fairchild were always thinking two or three steps ahead of the competition, and in the old days at least, Fairchild was perhaps better at this even than TI was.

But even in nominally capitalist societies it seems rare that many will really love you for doing that; shareholders and associated industries and the participants Moms and Dads, even, weren't big into what they were doing. "You got a good thing going! You just figured out a reliable way to make a transistor using process A and sell them at $15 each, people are clamoring to get them even at that price but you've hardly even produced that many and you're already talking about plan B, making some new thing you're going to sell at a _loss_? WTF"

Incidentally a number of the claims in the first reviews of that title are fairly accurate but it's not a one star book, maybe a three-star. It was written by a business-guy, not an engineer. And there are some odd choices about who to include like he dotes on An Wang a lot but DEC is given short shrift. /shrug

Seems likely, from what I've read he spent more time being paranoid about whether someone was trying to steal from him than actually working towards having something worth stealing.

Imagine how big a PITA you have to be if even Robert Noyce can't stand you, who AFAIK never exactly had a reputation as a "laid back and relaxed"-type of guy.

It's like that time Dave Mustaine of Megadeth was talking about Axl Rose of Guns n Roses and said something like "He's just...he's just a really self-absorbed person. He won't listen to anyone." this was Dave Mustaine saying this.

Nowadays, other people don't even have to work too hard at the killing:

They aren't what they were, and their activities on the standards groups that I knew about was all about protecting their market share, rather than getting better standards.

They've always been a crooked company, in much the same mold, always ready to shaft their customers. They have never been all that innovative.

Something relatively cheap and nasty ...

SNIPPERMAN, as usual, doesn't know what he is talking about. A large part of TI's business is with the automotive industry. These guys are VERY astute users of semiconductors and have much tougher specs than commercial products. TI delivers those products at competitive prices and have a huge backlog of orders from them.

Flyguy does like to claim that. Since Flyguy doesn't know what he is talking about he makes the claim more or less non-stop.

Flyguy doesn't know enough about the semiconductor business to know that everybody - not just Texas instruments - always made at least three grades of devices - military, industrial and commercial - for three different temperature ranges.

He probably doesn't know that Texas Instruments had a nasty habit of making "industry standard parts" to their own data sheets which offered lower performance than their competitors. Back in the 1970's when I had to put together company specifications for semiconductors (mostly op amps) we had to work out whether we could live with the TI parts.