Related: Kodak has no plans to cease, go out of business, or file for bankruptcy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44901330 |
Related: Kodak has no plans to cease, go out of business, or file for bankruptcy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44901330 |
Then again, Sears could have made Amazon a pets-dot-com flash in the pan.
It was such an obvious thing to do and they didn't do it.
* Eastman Kodak
* Kodak Alaris
* at least four separate Kodak licensees or more all also making photographic products among other plastic sludge: https://www.engadget.com/general/a-tale-of-four-kodaks-17304...
But looking at it, kodak shareholders were given 1 share of Eastman chemical for every 4 shares of Kodak they had. Eastman chemical has split once since then. Eastman chemical is now $60. Kodak ended 1993 (the new company was created jan 1 1994 I believe) at $56 a share.
So that would imply that eastman chemical, that was viewed as 1/5th the value of the combined company in 1994 is now the value of the parent that was left over then (and no longer really exists).
I'm not trying to be a dick or shitpost, but I genuinely thought they collapsed after I heard nothing about KodakCoin after the initial announcement.
I haven't touched a film camera in more than twenty years, so for most of my life I have only been aware of Kodak peripherally, so it's not like I was paying a lot of attention to them.
Writing’s been on the wall for quite a while though. I’m not surprised.
> There was a Sears-Roebuck, a Gillet, young Sidney Kodak who would one day be Kodak of Kodak, a Houbigant, Buick of Buick, and R. H. Macy XVI, head of the powerful Saks-Gimbel clan.
- The Stars My Destination
Kodak has even had to release a statement in response to this nonsense.
Anyway, buy Kodak film, maybe they'll bring some of the older ones back after they've cleared debts.
"Media reports that Kodak is ceasing operations, going out of business, or filing for bankruptcy are inaccurate and reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of a recent technical disclosure the Company made to the SEC in its recently filed second quarter earnings report. These articles are misleading and missing critical context, and we'd like to set the record straight."
https://www.kodak.com/en/company/blog-post/statement-regardi...
And there is the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect that was coined by Michael Crichton back in the early 2000s.
And that doesn't even start in on the parts perverted by our present stage of capitalism and the monsters at the top of it. So uh, it's nuanced, but yeah it feels like it sucks - there are people trying though.
1) The "Going Concern Assessment" that they put out was a regulatory requirement because they didn't have full control of the sale of parts of the pension. They say in the release that they're going to have the sale finalized on December 15th, with details on August 15th
2) They not only mention opening a new business segment, but built a lab AND got FDA approval for that segment (Advanced Materials & Chemicals)
3) The sale of the pension is going to have so much of a surplus they're going to pay down parts of the long debt that they have.
I'd love to be corrected if I'm misreading this, but the reports of Kodak's death seem greatly exaggerated
[1]: https://investor.kodak.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...
The basic background here is that Kodak has been pivotting at least for last 40 years.
- 1980s: Kodak tried to become a Chemical magnate. This strategy was abandoned in 1990s.
- 1990s: Kodak tried to become a Digital Imaging company. While it saw a brief success, Kodak lost the competition.
- 2000s: Kodak tried to become an Inkjet Printer company, which was doomed and eventually pushed it into bankruptcy.
- 2010s: Kodak tried to become a Blockchain company, issuing KodakCoin. It was a flop.
- 2020s: Kodak tried to become a Pharmaceutical company amid Covid-19 pandemic.
As of today, Kodak is focusing on its chemical business (such as manifacturing KODALUX, a fabric coating material) and borrowed $477M (at 12% p.a.) in order to expand that business line.
That loan is due in 2026. Kodak is basically saying "I have no idea how to repay that money. In fact, I only have $155M in cash. Maybe it's time to talk with the creditors?".
Its hard not to laugh at that. At least the pivots before that point kind of made sense. I guess 2010 came along and the executives just decided to yolo.
The folks running Kodak kind of forgot that Kodak was really a chemicals company that supported photography, not a photography company. Hence why the pivot into that was ill-fated and doomed.
Those were actually dye sublimation thermal printers and...they still sell them!
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19UdGkBYwr/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Also discussed on Reddit.
Even though the company is paying them, the accountant is saying "whelp, doesn't look like a sure thing to me!"
Their pension fund has assets outstripping its liabilities and they can essentially wind up the fund. Great! Except if the fund's assets suddenly drop in value (e.g. when interest rates go up, and their bonds mark to market value drops, or if the stock market crashes) or if the price of those annuities to be bought goes up (e.g. when interest rates go down, and you need to reserve more money now for payments later). Interest rates dropping is perhaps not inconceivable, with a president tweeting every week about firing the chairman of the Fed if rates aren't dropped? A stock market crash, however short term, is also not inconceivable, especially with so much of the index concentrated in a few tech stocks.
A "going concern" statement like this is worth more that the company's press release disagreeing with it.
At that point, it was pretty clear that they're on borrowed time. I'm surprised they had enough runway / credit to make it to 2025.
Kodak employed a whole town, and many more people besides. We're now waiting on a one-person unicorn.
The number of people benefiting from an enterprise has shrunk considerably, with the benefits accruing more tightly within an already wealthy class.
They were pretty much doomed from the start. They had built their business by taking a cut from every picture you took, from the rolls of film to the developing to the printing. There was absolutely nothing in the digital camera realm that could duplicate that; their revenue dropped like a rock. If they had sold every single digital camera ever bought, it wouldn't have made up for it.
The contrast between Kodak and Fujifilm is fascinating. Fujifilm survived by pivoting to manufacturing critical components for LCD panels, which were exploding in popularity at the time. https://web.archive.org/web/20250704224940/https://petapixel...
* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XXcmtNSUxoa...
I assume this means payments to retirees. It's a good reminder that (if you can help it) you should not rely 100% on any external source (including the government) for your retirement income.
You assume wrong. From November 2024:
> According to the company, the plan’s liabilities to qualifying participants would be satisfied through a combination of lump sum distributions and an annuity purchased from an insurance company to cover existing obligations. Kodak, like many corporate pension plans, is in a funding surplus; it has significantly more assets than liabilities owed to plan beneficiaries and participants.
* https://www.ai-cio.com/news/kodak-considers-terminating-over...
> Kodak retirees would receive an annuity from an insurance company. Current employees, as well as former employees who haven’t yet reached retirement, would be given an option to either receive a lump sum of their balance, or an annuity once they retire. Plan participants wouldn’t see a change in the value of the benefits that have been promised to them, executives said.
> Kodak expects to put a new retirement plan in place for current employees if it terminates the pension. The company hasn’t yet determined whether it would provide a defined-benefit or defined-contribution plan, such as a 401(k). The company would need to have a new plan designed and in place within about a year, executives said.
* https://www.wsj.com/articles/kodak-prepares-to-terminate-u-s...
The money in the pension fund, at least up to an amount needed to satisfy current liabilities, is the property of employees and Kodak has no right to it. It is the surplus that was taken back by Kodak last year, and future payments are the ones that are ceasing. Per WSJ above another retirement plan system will be setup for current employees.
This is what we would lose:
My team did an integration with Kodak-Alaris a few years back and we toured their main office in Rochester.
It could be that we stop being able to make chips, or printers, or something else because of this as a second or third order effect.
Losing a technological capability requires it to go decades without being practiced - long enough that those with the key knowledge die off. This can and has happened under the right circumstances, but probably wouldn't from a company going out of business.
It's just the technology that was the underpinning of the entire company has outlived its usefulness. You don't see many companies making horseshoes today - but there were thousands 150 years ago. They didn't fumble anything - just no longer needed.
I have always wondered, what happens to a pension plan when the company files for bankruptcy? What happens if the lump sum payment is not enough for retirees? Are they financially screwed until they die?
I’ll share an anecdote I witnessed in my extended family–it was horrible. When US Air went bankrupt, employees with decades of service, expecting high five-figure to low six-figure annual income, learned they would get roughly $0.20 on the dollar. For many who were entering retirement, the impact was life-changing, and the stress and disruption it caused could well be argued as life-shortening.
PBGC did take over, but that did not solve the problem.
I believe the root cause was mismanagement of the pension, with the bankruptcy merely exposing this. But I wouldn’t be surprised if, at every opportunity during the bankruptcy process, changes were made that eroded the program’s health.
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/us-airways-pilots...
Myself I shot slides from 1977 to 2001. Was not a big fan of Kodakchrome colors, preferred Fujichrome. And they were also cheaper, relevant for a student budget. After working with one of the first camera phones I have not bought any roll of film, even if in hindsight 100 KB VGA pictures were somewhat limiting... Now I mostly avoid taking photos because I won't have enough time in my life to keep them organized and watch them...
A true pivot of Kodak was moving from just doing chemicals for film to doing chemicals for the pharmaceutical industry. That actually involved employees changing what they do, changing factory equipment, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Chemical_Company
One really must admire their determination to throw all of the life boats overboard to go down with the film ship. Every time they have a chance to save themselves if they move away from a single minded focus on film, they discard the opportunity. They just needed to mimic Nikon and Canon to stay in business, but refused to do even that.
The only way I see Kodak having a happy ending would be if Eastman Chemical purchases their former parent company to put it under sane management.
Same things happens all over. Ford (a car company) completely failing to make a reasonable UI / App / Interface for their infotainment systems (something a tech company would do). Pivoting away from what you are good at is hard for a 3 person startup, but nearly impossible for a giant corporation.
Having said that, more of the cryptocurrency industry is scams than not - but then that also wouldn't necessarily exclude them from profitability...
The price of bitcoin being high does not mean your weird altcoin is a good investment. That would be like saying that because USD exchange rate is up it means every usa business is a good investment.
Anyway the issue seems to be that Polaroid (also Kodak) had what's called a razor blade business model. In Polaroids case they actually sold the cameras for the film, but they sold them cheap cheap cheap so as to encourage the use of the high margin product that they really wanted to shift - the film. Kodak went one better (sorta) by becoming a category killer in film so everyone who wanted to use a non-polaroid camera probably ended up buying Kodak film (razor blades).
There isn't really an equivalent consumable in digital, the action is in the camera (which ended up being connected to the smart phone). Now, Polaroid had consumer goods experience and consumer product R&D capability from making instamatics, and they had a management culture of investing big to create the next big thing - but even they just couldn't get past the "I'm telling you there is no business case for this" conversation in the C-suite. And here comes Clay with the Innovators Dilemma. The Polariod and Kodak executives both struggled to see past the investment cases which said things like "invest $100m to get $40m a year from efficiency savings in film manufacture, 100% for sure for ever here is proof that can't be discussed" to see "invest $20m to get $5m next year, growing 200% a year for the next 10 years maybe, I promise, honest that's what the future looks like fellas". Worse than that - investment in the digital industry would clearly kill the film industry, and the future for a digital Kodak looked radically different to the future for a film based Kodak and therefore there was a big constituency that didn't want to see their lovely chemical factories and lab based R&D shuttered in favour of a basement filled with computer geeks, also a bunch of people saw that their million $$ sales commissions for selling to corner store processors would go out of the window.
The turkeys... they do not vote for Christmas.
So the innovation cases that could have saved both companies didn't get the bucks and the rest is history. Sucks to be the shareholder left holding that stock when the veil of corporate propaganda masking the collapse finally fell. I remember a presentation from a Kodak team in about 2009 that would have convinced you that the future was indeed filled with Kodak moments spilling through everyone's life forever. Unless you actually knew what a digital camera was and how good they were then.
In the last few years a new thread of work [3] that unifies these kind of insights into a theory of innovation processes has emerged. I am a big fan but it hasn't got the kind of profile I think it should, probably because of Quantum AI Crypto flaps. It's quite instructive to use it to understand the Quantum AI Crypto stuff as well, but no one likes to hear about that because it's more fun to look at the pretty pictures I guess.
[1] Tripsas, M., & Gavetti, G. 2000. Capabilities, cognition, and inertia: Evidence from digital imaging. Strategic Management Journal, 21: 1147–1161.
[2] Christensen, C., Raynor, M.E. and McDonald, R., 2013. Disruptive innovation (pp. 20151-20111). Brighton, MA, USA: Harvard Business Review.
[3] Grondal, S., Krabbe, A.D. Chang-Zunio, M. THE EVOLUTION OF TECHNOLOGY. Academy of Management Annals 2023, Vol. 17, No. 1, 141–180. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2021.0086
The 'tech companies' (equivalent) of the past tended to deal with physical goods, and so needed physical means of scaling to become as large as they did.
More recent tech companies are often software goods and services, where physical means of scaling may not be as important (though see perhaps with Moore and Dennard). Though those which deal with physical stuff do seem to have higher counts; see below.
> The number of people benefiting from an enterprise has shrunk considerably, with the benefits accruing more tightly within an already wealthy class.
Not sure if this is completely accurate. Kodak topped out at 145,000 employees in 1988:
* https://rbj.net/2017/09/13/kodaks-decades-of-decline/
Apple has 164,000; Microsoft has 228,000; Amazon has 1,610,000.
(They both happen to be Quaker I believe, but I mean the point more generally.)
I hear tech can be big employers, maybe I'm overselling my point a bit there. That said, the trend is very much towards smaller operations, and a large headcount is not at all required for large money.
My overall point is that profits that at one time would require a town, or be a major part of a city's economy, can be made with a small office's worth of staff.
Many companies employed (and still employ) orders of magnitude more people than necessary just to be taken seriously. The executive team and board is stacked and diluting ownership just to get in rooms for more support and investors.
This was arguably never necessary, and in many markets people still believe they need to stack the deck and print employment numbers for any incorporated idea they have. The market reality changes far faster than the culture and I love seeing evolution of markets where individuals test a theoretical reality and do it.
I'm glad that people noticed and tried to keep ownership with parallel voting classes, and smaller personnel. I think there are some negatives and that exchanges can go back to enforcing listing guidelines which factor in ownership structure. But even amongst private companies and family offices, I think its interesting when people approach wealth acquisition in ways that match the liquidity of the markets more than the culture, for example, most billionaires stop trading or trying anything because they are afraid of losing money. While the liqiudity from the central bank and market reforms has gotten so much higher over just the last 10 years, that it was only a matter of time before someone tried to trade up to a $60bn portfolio size in the public markets (Bill Hwang). Its still only a matter of time before someone does it successfully and takes it to far larger amounts. Elon Musk sold nearly $40bn of Tesla shares in his court forced acquisition of Twitter, and that's just one stock ticker. Just a matter of time before someone leverages the liquidity in a more diverse portfolio of momentum stocks and has hundreds of billions without any personnel around them. I'm excited to see this capability.
Being able to convert assets to another asset at this speed and scale is something state actors and even Mansa Musa could never do. And the goal isn't done until everything can be valued within milliseconds and its value transferred to another owner, fractionally, with derivatives for future delivery on top.
Liquidity is the game. Just move to the next idea if liquidity isn't there as companies like Kodak from days of old are not necessary.
If you want to make money in the US, stay away from making hardware and cling to making software.
But they were a much smaller company and AFAIK are a pretty niche business today. (X-series cameras are nice but I can imagine that sales amount to a huge number.)
Looking around at similar companies, Nikon and Zeiss became specialist lens makers, for (eg) medical devices, specialist optics like binoculars, and yes, phones. Fuji got into medical imaging, x rays etc. Its almost like they all realized they were in the image business but in different ways.
One peer I find especially interesting is Corning as they were a similar one-trick pony (glass) in upstate New York. But Corning survived, and Kodak didnt. Gorilla glass for phones, fiber optics, etc are a million miles away from pyrex and labware. Why were Corning able to pivot and thrive, and not Kodak?
Not easy to turn a company around when the knowledge/qualifications/experience of most of your employees becomes almost worthless.
Thats also what made it easier for others (like Corning) to pivot (presumably).
[1] https://www.kodak.com/en/company/page/photography-history/
Kodak on the other hand attempted to diversify to those markets in the 80s and 90s but made some terrible investments that they managed poorly. That forced them to leave those markets and double down on film just in time for the point and shoot boom of the 90s and the early digital market. Kodak was a heavy player in the digital camera market up to the cell phone era: they had the first dSLR and were the dSLR market for most of the 90s, they had the first commercially successful lines of digital point and shoots, they had the first full frame dSLR in the early 00s and jockeyed for positions 1-3 in the point and shoot market until the smart phone era. They continued to make CCD sensors for everyone during this time. Ya they missed the CMOS change over and smarthphone sensor market, but that was well after they were already in the drain.
It’s rare to be first AND the leader 20 years later.
There was no upside at all in being first with this particular invention. No lessons to learn, other than "Keep working on this and try to grab all the patents, even though they will expire before anyone cares."
Which why we're all flying on Wright airplanes, using Kenbak Personal Computers, and are all calling eachother with Bell telephones.
Being first to a market and not winning, or not even surviving isn't 'mismanagement on a gargantuan scale'. Especially when it comes to consumer devices, which have no moat or potential for monopoly consolidation.
-Sent from my BlackBerry(tm)
My father worked there for 33 years. I did an internship in 1984. My boss took me on a tour of one of the buildings at our site - where all disc cameras were manufactured. When I did my internship, the single site where I worked employed 14,000 people. Our start and end times were staggered in five minute increments to manage traffic.
[0] https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/kodak-engineer-ha...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kodak-digital-camera-inven...
In particular:
"While this may have been a motivating factor to some at Kodak, such concerns did not stop Kodak — or even Sasson — from further developing digital cameras and making several technical developments that led to Kodak's first publicly available digital camera in 1991, the Digital Camera System."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
[2] https://innovationmanagement.se/2017/05/24/the-innovators-di...
The journalists who drove the Muckraker movement [0] were a mix of self taught and state school grads who worked for newspapers like McClure and the World which were founded by hardscrabble immigrants [1][2] who were educated in a nontraditional background.
Fundamentally, journalism back in the day was a calling that could only be learned by doing, and the modern "BA-to-MA-to-Local-to-National" pipeline is an aberration.
Ironically, the more charged, polarized, and independent news blogs are closer to "original" Muckraker journalism than centralized institutions like a NYT or a CNN.
Imo, an apprentice driven model coupled with part-time college would probably help solve the journalism pipeline issue.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker
Now that rates have risen across the yield curve the cost of locking in coverage for those liabilities (typically with long duration government bonds) has reduced, leading to a surplus in the pot.
Selling the scheme to the insurance industry while it's in surplus lets them claw some money back and get it off their books forever
They seem late to the party though as rates are coming down. 2023-4 would have been when the iron was hot.
But you can't just yank out the carpet from a massive consumables business that basically underpinned a company's revenue and profits almost overnight and reasonably expect them to deal with it.
Huh
Hopefully they'd be unscratched if the big Kodak goes down (I assume they still have some equity?)
That'd still be a big change of course, but it's better than not being a player.
Or they could've been Sony, who's now both a major player in cameras and supplying sensors to tons of other cameras.
It makes perfect sense that the modern press has devolved to a 24-hour rumor mill; if they hadn't, they'd be even more irrelevant.
But was this even a real pivot? They "rented" out their name to a company with an already failed crypto coin project, who thought they'll make it if they use a bigger brand. A pivot implies some effort to change the business model, not just literally throwing your name out there and hoping money follows.
More than 50% of it's imaging business in 2022
People that need income or capital to play this game at all will have to pursue another path of getting that, this post isn’t about their options and private sector employment by billionaires isn’t the only possibility
But the projects built on it are all questionable and only make money for the builders who slowly rug them
Not sure how they realize all those gains tho, or what happens to the stock price when they try to exit in a substantial manner.
And yeah, BTC went up huge amounts, but certainly they were a large part of the buying pressure to get it there. But like you asked, how do they realize anything? Unless they get US government to start buying and shift their bags to the US tax payer, how do they do anything with their BTC? Besides using it as collateral to borrow even more money to inflate a even higher bubble?
And Bell's telephony network (which unlike consumer devices has a moat) was split up by the courts. I'm talking about telephones. Those devices with a base station, a handle, and a dial pad or a rotor (or sans all that, a switching board lady who will connect you to whomever you need to talk to).
Bell was the first to market with the personal telephone, but for some reason, didn't corner the market for consumer devices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Chemical_Company
Eastman Chemical Company is still doing fine.
https://archive.is/20250424104926/https://www.economist.com/...
It's just that the cell phones took over that job. (And a dozen other ones too.)
In essence, America was ruined by a kind of fast talking con artistry by people with selfish interests. America has fallen to con artists … “listen here. What you really need to do is help others in my interest, and not help your own in your own interests. That’s the smart thing to do. You see?“
Kodak mgmt wasn't crazy or anything like that.
I ended up with a Polaroid Go. It's relatively tiny. The output is nowhere near as good (arguably awful), but for my use, it's fine. I have 35mm film and mirrorless digital cameras when I want "good" photos.
What film stock are you seeing that's $1/shot?
Smartphone cameras and digital distribution of images would have killed them 10-20 years later anyway.
The question of why is CEO and executive pay so high always comes up, and between Kodak and RIM/Blackberry, it's easy to argue the good ones are worth what they're paid, as the ones who tank the company clearly are not.
As for executive pay, I think the biggest problem is that it often seems like the executive class gets richly rewarded whether they succeed or fail. Boeing's former CEO was rewarded more for his failures than most people earn for a lifetime of good performance.
It seems to be the very same challenge that Google is now dealing with and suffering from. My understanding is that they could have beat OpenAI to market, but they also realized it would savage their core cash cow the search-ad ecosystem they’ve built over decades now; so they put on the brakes and effectively gave way to the competition being able to overtake them. They choked under pressure. Frankly, just for that reason Nadal should have already been removed by now, almost 3 years after the release of ChatGPT. But it’s also a sign of an incompetent and out of touch board that he has not been removed.
It’s immensely challenging to make such a leap. It’s akin to an addiction, how do you convince a Google to give up its search-ad meth? It is nearly impossible short of drastic events. You have to have a clear vision.
Ironically, it seems Microsoft has been making these types of hard decisions, but that also probably is because they’ve been under some intense pressure in various businesses for a while now, i.e., they have not really been king of the hill in anything that they are not de facto monopolists, e.g., PC OS. It is easier to pivot strategies when you’re not vested in maintaining something and their dominance over the whole government-corporate PC network allows them room to operate for am the time being. But there is also a reason why AI has been called an operating system. In the AI-scale medium term, Windows and its involvement in a user facing computer network is also doomed.
Similarly, Ford has more employees than Gran Turismo, but they're not in the same industry.
This has been true for most industries even 'with-in themselves': it's called productivity growth.
The number of employees (or man-hours) needed to create (say) a tonne of steel has dropped a lot, so where previously you had 'steel towns', now a plant may just have a very few (and produce more tonnage than they've ever done).
Kodak required so many because it owned nearly the whole stack.
But that said, we can't just add the number of AWS employees to the number of Instagram employees, because we have to prorate it by the total number of companies that use AWS (or whatever).
We have seen a decrease in companies that work on physical engineering goods, but plenty still remain.
The difference is, engineering physical goods has been increasingly automated and skilled for decades now (robotic manufacturing, additive manufacturing, CAD tooling, etc has been a thing for decades now), so you will need at least an associates but often a bachelors degrees in a STEM field to climb the ladder in Automtotive, Aerospace, Electronics, Pharma, Chemicals, and Defense manufacturing.
Even the "MBAs" they hire in LDPs are required to have technical undergrad degrees before joining an MBA.
I don't like the fact that stores like Fry's don't exist anymore, but electronics is a much more niche hobby now than it was 30/40/50 years ago and is much less hobbyist friendly - building something with an 8088 might be fun, but not as much anymore when you can purchase a STM32 for a fraction of what they 8088 was 30 years ago. Coding has becoming a very prevalent hobby now, and access to hobbyist boards like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis has become much more democratized.
The US can align incentives to encourage different types of manufacturing of if it wants. I didn't say anything about whether it's a good idea.
Though I feel like generally the narrative being spun for folks is that factory jobs largely got automated, which is true only in the fact that the remaining factory jobs got automated. The vast majority of them went overseas because it was cheaper. Otherwise the country wouldn't be filled with rusting factory towns and you'd still be able to find lots of household goods made in the US.
I mean, factory cities in other countries are also increasingly being automated as well.
Look at what happened to Wolfsburg in Germany as well as the investments in robotic and additive manufacturing in China leading to around 20 million factory jobs being shed from 2013 to 2023 [0]. If an Indian auto manufacturers like Maruti Suzuki themselves had a 1 robot for 4 employee ratio by 2017 [1] in a country where labor (skilled and unskilled) is cheap, it shows where the tide is turning globally for factory cities.
Globally, manufacturing (especially in electronics, chemicals, pharma, automotive, and aerospace) has become much more automated because the cost barriers for automation have fallen significantly. For example, a robotic arm like that which Kuka or FANUC manufactures costs around $30-40k to install, whereas 30 years ago an industrial robot would have costed around $65-115k in 2003 dollars [2]
The era of single factory cities is coming to a close globally. Industries are overwhelmingly clustering in hubs in order to take full advantage of supply chains and vendor ecosystems.
[0] - https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/06/10/f...
[1] - https://www.livemint.com/Companies/0qexlea1C0MelXiAXcveOJ/Ro...
[2] - https://unece.org/sites/default/files/datastore/fileadmin/DA...
I don't think it's so much that electronics is more niche of a hobby but instead of going to Frys or Radio Shack people can click a button and order from Amazon or the Arduino store or anywhere else. There's no hoping a shop has a part you need. You just pick it and are done.
> Even the "MBAs" they hire in LDPs are required to have technical undergrad degrees before joining an MBA.
It frightens me the quotes you put around "MBAs" like that, those are the best type of MBAs. In general the cadre of people who go directly or an MBA with zero industrial exposure have very different aims than the ones that do (also their funding sources are very different).
It is in Medical Devices and Defense Tech.
The San Diego and Tijuana EDCs are closely integrated and use a single-window system so that you as a company doing R&D in SD and prototyping and manufacturing in Tijuana are dealing with a single entity.
> It frightens me the quotes you put around "MBAs" like that
Because on HN, people use "MBA" to designate CorpDev, FP&A, CorpStrat, GM, and other management and revenue ownership roles.
> those are the best type of MBAs
I agree, and employers agree as well.
There's a reason alumni from Wharton SF, Haas PTMBA, Stanford HCP MS&E, MIT's Sloan+LGO Fellowship, CMU Tepper's PTMBA, UW Foster's EMBA, UT McCombs' Hildebrand MBA, and UCLA Anderson's FlexMBA are overrepresented in engineering industries.
Employers tend to sponsor high leadership potential employees to attend these programs in return for them climbing the ladder internally.
An entire generation of Cybersecurity and Enterprise SaaS CPOs and CEOs are products of this initiative at Cisco and PANW back in the 2000s
> The same strip malls on every block and beige-box sprawl as far as the eye could see
Plenty of industrial cities are similar. And as I mentioned in the previous response, manufacturing is much more automated and skilled today - it's increasingly a white collar job in nature.
That is an unsustainable model.
> You still get to employ thousands who don't necessarily have a PhD in computer science
You're a magnitude off. It's more like hundreds, and you will tend to hire people with a BS in an Engineering discipline.
More to the point, the sales of Kodak Photo CD many years earlier should have tipped them off to what would happen once a small, cheap-enough digital camera met the broad quality of the lowest resolution photo CD scan (or even approached it, given how bad most people's photos are and how digital cameras made better photography easier for everyone). And given how they were doing the R&D, they should have known what was coming. Not just people not buying film, but people not really paying for prints, which is a double-whammy.
Kodak management wasn't crazy but it was entitled, boorish, inept and lazy. A classic late-stage US company. They were overconfident about their reputation and their essential status (just like Intel). At best, perhaps they were just too self-absorbed to be able to dispassionately react to what was happening.
The problem is that digital required a different approach to profit because the revenue and profit was lumpier.
As a result Kodak's biggest problem is that they could not possibly have pivoted even late on, because their line of digital products was a total pile of exploitative shit over the long term, that offered intermediate, semi-pro and pro users nothing at all of value and was already reviewing rather badly.
People outside the USA simply didn't buy Kodak digital cameras because we didn't hold Kodak in the same regard, and there were so many other choices.
Kodak also overstretched itself repeatedly in international markets, including a hilariously stupid late-era buyout of a competitor's high street lab chain in the UK so there were times when really small towns had two tiny, lacklustre Kodak stores when they barely needed one.
Fujifilm did better (by planning both good digital cameras and a transition to the well-marketed Instax and digital Crystal Archive printing as well as building ancilliary businesses). Heck, even Ilford hung on for longer, to the extent that their business produced better consumer inkjet materials than anyone else. When they were finally restructured in administration they had made the film business lean enough to survive into a management buyout.
Compare that to the increadidble lateral thinking they employed when they re-packaged their movie film stock into short rolls, made a cheap-ass camera to accommodate it (the box brownie) and established a printing service to process the results. Pure genius.
They were screwed long before capitalising on this was a real possibility. The damage was done to Kodak before the vast majority of consumers had fast enough broadband to share more than a couple of photographs a day.
Kodak was an obviously cheesy, out-of-touch, cheap-looking digital brand by 2000, and it showed (at least to anyone outside the USA). The Fuji, Olympus, Nikon and Canon compacts were better-designed, full stop, and Kodak really even had nothing good in the "office camera", "lab camera" or "art department camera" offerings (which Nikon owned with the Coolpix 900 series, and Canon with the G1/G2/G3).
People simply would not have bought into the idea that anything Kodak did was cool or fun. It was the same bad cheesy smiling family branding nonsense.
I think they sold in the low thousands of that DSLR (since it was a $15K camera). And the state of these partnership cameras was such that it was obvious they were something of a bridge to nowhere. Anyone could see that once Canon and Nikon began making their own things, Kodak would have trouble carrying on with their remodelled cameras.
Nikon had already shipped their first "conventional" in-house DSLR by then, and it was blowing people away.
Kodak should arguably have bought Sigma around then, but they didn't. They continued making these reworked/hybrid Canon/Nikon things until 2004 but when they quit making DSLRs they said the sector had "poor profitability". In 2005! Even Nikon was making a profit in 2005.
Back to the compact cameras:
This is the higher-end compact camera Canon shipped in 2000 (that all the real estate photographers were using):
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canong1
This is its Nikon competition, which was an incredible camera widely used in professional settings; they turned up in labs attached to microscopes, in rapid newspaper repro, in museums, web development agencies, all over the place:
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikoncp990
Sony, Fuji and Olympus had great kit in this segment already. Kodak really just had nothing even close as far as enthusiasts and early adopters were concerned.
I guess the Sigma film SLRs and DSLRs were in some ways functionally behind (in terms of stuff like handling and autofocus), and it wouldn't necessarily be cheap to catch up. Also early-2000s era Sigma didn't actually own all of Foveon yet, I suppose.
There has always been some suggestion that Sigma didn't entertain offers to become a big camera brand because it would lose the quiet tolerance it had earned from Japanese camera brands that allowed it to make most of its money from third-party lenses without squabbles over proprietary information.