An Ending

[unkbar]

After twenty-nine years, nine and a half months, today was my last day at Eastman Kodak.

It was a very different company when I joined on.  The big news that summer was that Kodak had bought Spin Physics, a maker of magnetic recording heads, to get the technology they needed to build 8mm cameras and projectorsfor home movies with sound.  Kodak was

Comments

[tigertoy]

Back when digital cameras were something that a few geeks talked about rather than something ordinary people owned, I remember news stories about Kodak's management trying to steer the company aggressively toward exclusively digital and the institutional shareholders forcing them to continue to pour a ton of money and time into the dinosaur of film. At that time, I became convinced that Kodak, and to a large extent all big American companies, had no long-term future. Perhaps naively, I believe that I'd be using Kodak cameras today rather than Canon if the management had won that battle back then.

Kodak is well on its way to becoming a smaller, successful digital imaging company. Part of that process involved shedding its Health Group. Once a major supplier of X-ray film, the Health Group had produced a successful line of digital X-ray equipment. Alas, competing in that industry required more R&D funding than the new, smaller Kodak could supply, so the Health Group is no more.This sounds like the same kind of short-sightedness.